Skip to main content

Eleanor Courtemanche

Associate Professor

Research Interests

  • Economic and political approaches to Victorian fiction
  • History of economic theory in Europe and America; utopian novels
  • History of urban planning; narrative theory; irony and comedy
  • An affiliate of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Program in Comparative and World Literature, and the Department of German. Blog posts are cross-posted at arcade.stanford.edu.

Education

  • PhD (Comparative Literature): Cornell 1998.
  • MA (Comparative Literature): Cornell 1994.
  • BA: Yale 1990 (summa cum laude).

Courses Taught

Grad Courses (Eng 537): "The Industrial Novel and the Rise of Cultural Studies (2006), "Sexuality and Empire in the Fin de Siècle" (2009), "Victorian Socialisms" (2011), "Machine Dreams: Victorian Utopias" (2012), "The Best Recent Criticism of Victorian Novels" (2015), "Victorian Political Radicalism" (2017), "The Uses and Abuses of Victorian Historicism (2019), "Sustainability and Utopia in Victorian Britain" (2021).

Selected Undergrad Courses:

Eng 208: Victorian Literature and Culture

Eng 247: The British Novel

Eng 350: Pulp Fictions of the 1890s

Eng 396: Victorian Utopias

Eng 435: 19th C British Fiction 

Additional Campus Affiliations

Associate Professor, English
Associate Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Associate Professor, Program in Comparative and World Literature
Associate Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Highlighted Publications

Courtemanche, E. (2011). The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism. (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304987

View all publications on Illinois Experts

Recent Publications

Courtemanche, E. (2023). Payback Time: Dickens and Revolution. Victorian Studies, 65(3), 425-433. https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.00007

Courtemanche, E. (2020). Book Review of Robert C. Holub's Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Investigations . Victorian Studies, 62(2), 338-40.

Courtemanche, E. (2020). Internet Dystopias After Trump. Web publication/site, Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/internet-dystopias-after-trump/

Courtemanche, E. (2019). Beyond urgency: Shadow presentisms, hinge points, and victorian historicisms. Criticism, 61(4), 461-479. https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.61.4.0461

Courtemanche, E. (2018). Book Review of Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business: Narrating Capitalism . Victorian Studies, 60(3), 512-13.

View all publications on Illinois Experts