Jerome McGann

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Jerome McGann (born July 22, 1937) is a scholar, essayist, and textual theorist whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present. His work on Romanticism (especially Lord Byron) has had a transformative effect on the field, as did his work on theory of texts and theory of editing. The two books published in 1983, The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, were the pivot points of his innovative work in those areas. He is also a major figure in the study of literary modernism and Victorian Literature and Culture, and he has a special interest in Contemporary Literature as it has continued the traditions of innovative and experimental writing that began to emerge in the late eighteenth-century.

Perhaps best known as one of the initiators of the "turn to history" in literary and cultural studies in the late 1970s and 1980s, his mode of "New Historicism" is distinctive in having been deeply marked by his work in editing and textual studies.

Although he has often said "I am not a poet", he has written four books of poetry and has published a good deal of other poetry, often under pseudonyms. The most important of these volumes are the first and the last, Air Heart Sermons (1976) and Four Last Poems (1996), both published by Pasdeloup Press in Canada.

He has been married since 1960 (to Anne Lanni) and has three children (born 1963, 1965, 1967)

Educated at LeMoyne College (B.S. 1959), Syracuse University (M.A. 1962) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1966), McGann has taught at numerous universities and colleges, most recently the University of Virginia (1986- ). He is the recipient of numerous awards and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other awards include: Melville Cane Award, American Poetry Society, 1973, for his work on Swinburne as "The Year's Best Critical Book about Poetry"; Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America (1989); Distinguished Scholar Award from the Byron Society of America, 1989; and the Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University Graduate School, 1994. In 2002 he was the recipient of three major awards: the Richard W. Lyman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Humanities Computing, National Humanities Center (first award reciptient); the James Russell Lowell Award (from the Modern Language Association) for Radiant Textuality as the Most Distinguished Scholarly Book of the Year; and the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. In 1996 the Univesity of Chicago awareded him an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

He has been a Fulbright Fellow (1965-66), an American Philosophical Society Fellow (1967) and Guggenheim Fellow (1970-71, 1976-77) and has been awarded NEH grants in 1975-76, 1987-89, 2003-2006, as well as grants from the Getty Foundation and the Delmas Founation. He has held more than a dozen other appointments, including President, Society for Textual Scholarship, 1995-1997; and President, Society for Critical Exchange, 2005-6. Since 1999 he has been a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, U. of London.

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Since 1993 he has been much involved with exploring the resources of information technology for creative and scholarly work in the humanities. That year he embarked on his monumental The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Hypermedia Research Archive (1993-). From that emerged (in 2001) the theoretical discussion group, founded by McGann and Johanna Drucker at U. of Virginia, Speclab, where the basic ideas for various important and influential humanities software projects were gestated (including IVANHOE, JuXta, and Collex). In 2003, he founded NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteeth-century Electronic Scholarship and ARP software lab with the proceeds of his 2002 Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

[edit] References

McGann, Jerome J. (Jerome John) (1993). Black riders the visible language of modernism. Princeton, N.J. :: Princeton University Press,, xvi, 196p. : ill ; 25 cm.. ISBN 0691015449 (PB : acid-free paper). 

1. ^ Jerome McGann Homepage at the University of Virginia

[edit] External links

• NINES website

[edit] Selected Bibliography

• Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development. University of Chicago Press, 1969
• Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1972
• The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. University of Chicago Press, 1983
• A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1983
• The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Clarendon Press, 1985
• Social Values and Poetic Acts. Harvard U. Press, 1987
• Towards a Literature of Knowledge. Oxford U. Press and U. of Chicago Press, 1989
• The Textual Condition. Princeton U. Press, 1991
• Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton UP, 1993
• Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. with Introduction, Apparatus, and Commentaries. 7 Vols. Clarendon Press, The Oxford English Texts series, 1980-1993
• Poetics of Sensibility. A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford UP, 1996
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost. Yale UP, 2000
• Radiant Textuality. Literature Since the World Wide Web. Palgrave/St Martins, 2001
• Byron and Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2002
• Algernon Charles Swinburne. Major Poems and Selected Prose. Yale UP, 2004
• The Scholar's Art. Literary Studies in a Managed World. U. of Chicago Press, 2006
• The Point is to Change It. Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present. U. of Alabama Press, 2007