Author of two books on nineteenth-century British literature, Peter Logan specializes in critical theory, the history of the novel, and the histories of medicine and anthropology. His most recent book, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), considers the centrality 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 2010.

He received his Ph.D. and B.A. 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 has published articles in Cultural Critique, Victorian Literature and Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, History of the Human Sciences, and other journals.

Contact: peter.logan@temple.edu