Stefanie Markovits

I research and teach English literature of the long Nineteenth Century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German classical literature (especially Goethe and Schiller), aesthetic theory, war and literature, and genre theory.

My first book demonstrated the scope of my concerns by considering the treatment of literary and political action in writers from Wordsworth to Henry James. While my second, on the Victorian response to an unpopular war (the Crimean War, 1854-56), was narrower, it allowed me to think further about the impact of social and political matters on formal ones: how (for example) does patriotic poetry translate the blunders of the Crimea into verse? My third book offers an in-depth account of the verse-novel as it arose in the mid-Victorian period, focusing on how the split allegiances of its component genres allow for the unleashing of radical energies. My new book, The Number-Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, considers how the many numbers scattered through the literature of the period contribute to their meaning-making.

Selected Publications

- The Number-Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2025.

-  “Making Soldiers Count: Literature and War in the 1850s,” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1850s, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024), 179-200. 

- “Novels.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Springer, 2022).  

- “But Who’s Counting? Plotting Age in Trollope.” Genre 53.2 (July 2020): 111-133.

 - “Don Juan’s Numerals.”  European Romantic Review 29.5 (October 2018): 1-17.

- The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life, September 2017

- “Adulterated Form: Violet Fane and the Vicotrian Verse-Novel,” ELH 81.2 (Summer 2014): 633-59.

- “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian Diamonds,” Victorian Studies 52.4 (Summer 2010): 591-619.

- The Crimean War in the British Imagination, October 2009

- “Rushing Into Print: ‘Participatory Journalism’ During the Crimean War,” Victorian Studies 50.4 (2008): 559-86.

- The Crisis of Action in English Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 2006

Courses

Undergraduate: Writing About Literature I, Major English Poets, European Literary Tradition, Jane Austen (Freshman seminar, Junior seminar), The Romantic Novel (Junior seminar), The Victorian Novel (lecture), The Victorian Political Novel, Nineteenth-Century Historical Narratives

Graduate: Nineteenth-Century Long Narrative Poetry, Charles Dickens and George Eliot

updated February 2025