Department of English
Peter Logan
Peter Logan specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, history of the novel, and histories of medicine and anthropology.
He received both his PhD and BA from the University of California, Berkeley. His book Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) argued that there was a connection between early nineteenth-century first-person narrative forms and ideas about hysteria and nervous disorders at the time.
He recently completed a new book, Fetishism and Culture: Primitives in the Victorian Culture Debate, which considers the role of Auguste Comte's primitive in British writing on culture. A new book project is underway, on the representation of lunatic asylums in mid-Victorian fiction and the representation of fiction in psychiatric literature. He is also General Editor of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, due out in 2009. He has published articles in Cultural Critique, Victorian Literature and Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, History of the Human Sciences, and other journals.