Heather Klemann

I am interested in the performance of reading: what happens when we recline in an armchair (or stand in a train car), turn pages (or swipe our index finger across a screen), and scan words. My current book project examines how eighteenth and early nineteenth-century authors anticipate, illustrate, and inform these performances in their readers, and offers reasons why fiction writers in this period paid attention to the pragmatics of the reading act. My essay “The Matter of Moral Education: Locke, Newbery, and the Didactic Book-Toy Hybrid,” studies the performative didacticism of works presented for young readers in the eighteenth century. “Ethos in Jane Austen’s Emma” considers how Austen cultivates shared ethos in her readers through the act of solitary reading. And in “How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria,” I examine the pivotal role of Wollstonecraft’s writing for children in shaping her ideas about gender and reason.

I serve as the Director of Expository Writing and Course Co-Director for the English 114 Writing Seminars.

Selected Publications

- “Under the ‘Impulse of Nature’: Animals and the Eighteenth-Century Child,” Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century and the Child, ed. Andrew O’Malley (forthcoming)

- “Mo Willems and the Poetics of Parenthood,” Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children’s Literature, ed. Timothy Young (2016)

- “How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria.” The Lion and the Unicorn. (January 2015): 1–22.

- “Ethos in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Studies in Romanticism 51, no. 4 (2012): 503–532.

- “The Matter of Moral Education: Locke, Newbery, and the Didactic Book-Toy Hybrid.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 223–244. 

- “Boswell and the Un-diarized Month of October 1769.” The Johnsonian News Letter 61, no. 2 (2010): 30–33.

Courses

Vampires, Castles, Werewolves (ENGL 136); Digital Childhood (ENGL 114); Childhood, Self, and Society (ENGL 114); Reading and Writing the Modern Essay (ENGL 120)