Associate Professor
Director, Undergraduate Studies

office: 364 McReynolds
phone: 573-882-8739
email: evelevj@missouri.edu
office hours: TR 9:30-11
or by appointment

Research and teaching areas:
19th century American literature
and cultural theory

John Evelev

John Evelev teaches courses in American literature and cultural theory. His research focuses on mid-nineteenth-century literature with a cultural studies methodology. His book, Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville, Professionalism and Antebellum New York City (UMass Press, 2006) reads Melville's literary career through the class politics of city life. His current project, Reformist Landscapes: The Social Politics of the Literary Picturesque, reads works of the literary genres of the picturesque in the mid-19th century to examine how the middle class sought to reshape the American landscape to reflect their political and social values. The project looks at a range of writers engaging with these genres from the familiar (Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau) to the well-known, but seldom now read (Longfellow, Willis, Holmes, Mitchell (Ik Marvel)), to other writers of the period now wholly forgotten. The project of examining this mix of authors within some now obscure generic categories is not intended to realign or reaffirm notions of literary merit, but to understand how an aesthetic mode or sensibility became a means of thinking through a range of issues crucial to middle-class selfhood in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Education

• A.B 1987, Bowdoin College
• PhD 1995, Duke University

Selected Publications

• The Politics of the New England Village Novel: The Picturesque Sensibility and Reform ESQ vol. 53:2 (2007), 149-77
• Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York 2006 www.umass.edu
• "Every One to His Trade": Mardi, Literary Form and Professional Ideology American Literature 75:2 (2003)
• The Contrast: The Problem of Theatricality and Political and Social Crisis in Postrevolutionary America Early American Literature 31:1 (1996)
• Typee, Tattooing, and the Literary Marketplace Arizona Quarterly 48:4 (1992)

Courses Taught

• English 2300: Readings in American Literature: American Travel Narratives
• English 3310: Survey of American Literature, 1865 to Present
• English 3310: Survey of American Literature, 1865-Present
• English 4100/7100: Genres
• English 4310: Topics in 19th Century American Literature: Romanticism and Reform in Antebellum America
• English 4310: Topics in 19th Century American Literature: The City and the Country in Antebellum U.S. Literature & Culture
• English 4970: The Capstone Experience
• English 4995: Honors Senior Essay
• English 8310: Seminar in 19th-Century American Literature

Selected Awards

• Botein Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society
• Research Board Fellowship, University of Missouri
• Summer Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities

address: 107 Tate Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-1500
phone: 573.882.6421 | fax: 573.882.5785 | department email: umcenglish@missouri.edu

website email: englishweb@missouri.edu
maintained by Sarah Zurhellen

English Department | College of Arts and Science | University of Missouri
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