Dr Andrew Lawson
BA (Hons), MA, DPhil
School Responsibilities
Principal Lecturer in English Literature
Teaching Interests
Andrew currently teaches the undergraduate modules Materialist Americas and Modern American Drama for the English Literature award, and Nineteenth-Century America for the English and History award.
Research Interests
For the last few years Andrew has been developing an interdisciplinary project on class and nineteenth-century American Literature, the first part of which was published as Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (University of Iowa Press, 2006). The book challenges the established view of Whitman as a working-class poet, and shows how Whitman's class identity and poetics are shaped by the artisan culture of the antebellum period.
A new book, Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism, will be published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. Andrew argues that realism first emerged as a distinctive literary form in the 1830s as a response to the abstract and unpredictable nature of the new market economy. He shows how a range of writers, including Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, sought sharpness, concreteness and immediacy in their writing, as the social world was becoming increasingly dematerialized and destabilized by financial speculation and recurrent economic crises.
Andrew's current research projects are developing along two lines: an exploration of the relationship between the economy and the emotions in the nineteenth century; and a cultural history of finance capital in the twentieth century.
Publications
Lawson, Andrew (2012) "Moby-Dick and the American Empire," Comparative American Studies 10 (1), pp.44-61 ISSN 1477-5700.
Lawson, A. (2010) "Making Market Manhood; or, Harry Franco Comforted by Henry Ward Beecher, Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life. ISSN 1544-824X
Lawson, A. (2011) "Mark Twain, Class, and the Gilded Age," in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (eds.), Cambridge University Press, pp.365-379.
Lawson, A. (2011) "'Perpetual Capital': Roderick Hudson, Aestheticism, and the Problem of Inheritance," Henry James Review 32 (2), pp. 178-191.
Lawson, A. (2010) "Men of Small Property: Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the Antebellum Market," Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 10 (4). http://www.common-place.org/vol-10/no-04/lawson/
Lawson, A. (2009) "Early Literary Modernism," in Matthews, J. T. (ed.), A Companion to the Modern American Novel, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 141-159.
Lawson, A. (2006) "Class and Antebellum American Literature," Blackwell Literature Compass 3 (6), pp.1200-1217.
Consultation Hours
Tuesday 14:00 - 15:00
Thursday 11:00 - 12:00
Contact Details
Room A214
School of Cultural Studies
Humanities Building
Broadcasting Place
Leeds Metropolitan University
Civic Quarter
Leeds LS2 9EN
Tel: 0113 812 3369
Fax. 0113 812 3112
Email: a.lawson@leedsmet.ac.uk