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Sean
Christopher Grass Associate Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies Department of English Texas Tech University telephone (806) 742-2500
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Links to Resources in Victorian Studies
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Sean Grass entered the
Department of English
at Texas Tech in August 2001. He is the author of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner,
essays on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Christina Rossetti, and Victorian
cultural history, and he has received two grants
from the NEH to support research for current project, "Portable property": Commodity and
Identity in Victorian Narrative. He has presented his work at several major conferences and served as Chair of the 19th-century
British literature division of the South Central Modern Language Association. In
2001, his essay "W. H. Auden: From Spain to 'Oxford': won the South Atlantic
Review Essay Prize, and in 2004 he was nominated for
the Gustave O. Arlt Prize in the Humanities.
Sean also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies, calls the Nineteenth-Century Studies reading group, and directs graduate and undergraduate research. If you are considering graduate study in nineteenth-century British or American literature and would like information about the resources available for nineteenth-century studies at Texas Tech, please email to ncs@ttu.edu. For more information generally about the graduate programs in English at Texas Tech, write to english.gradadvisor@ttu.edu. When Sean is not reading, writing about, or teaching Victorian literature, he spends time with his wife and pets at their home in Lubbock. They support the Lubbock Arts Festival and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. They have also had adventures in places from California to Costa Rica, London, Illinois, and Alabama. |
The
Self in the Cell (Routledge 2003) addresses Victorian
imprisonment and narrative
power in novels by Dickens, Collins, Charlotte Brontė, Charles Reade, and
Marcus Clarke. Reviews of The Self in the Cell have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Victorian Studies,
Dickens Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel, among other
places. "Portable property" draws upon The
Self in the Cell's investigations of autobiography during the middle
of the century, extending its inquiry into the authorship, marketing, and sales of
mid-Victorian autobiography. To what extend did Victorians make identity into "portable property"
through the aggressive commercialization of autobiography, and what were
the cultural implications of making identity into a commodity to be bought
and sold on the open market? Sean's other work in progress includes essays
on
imprisonment and narration in Great Expectations, piracy
in Reade's Hard Cash, and the Victorian literary market. For more
information, try the "Current Research" link above.