Department of English

Academic Specialty:

British Romantic Literature

Education:

• Ph.D., University of Virginia

William Brewer joined the Appalachian State English Department faculty in 1987. His publications include three monographs, five scholarly editions, three essay collections, and numerous essays on the literature of the British Romantic period. Since 2017, he has served as the book review editor of European Romantic Review. Currently, he is writing about duelling, caning, and fencing during the British Romantic period.

Selected Publications:

• “Mary Robinson’s Walsingham: Self-Monsterization, Gender Nonconformity, and Sexual (Dis)orientation.” Gothic Studies 25.2 (2023): 199–216.
• “Aaron Burr and Mary Shelley’s Lodore.” Keats-Shelley Review (36.1). (2022), 9-20.
• (ed.) The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier. A Comedy, by Hannah Cowley. London: Anthem Press, 2021.
• “Life-and-Death Struggles and Bildung in William Godwin’s Fiction.” Journal of Romanticism 4 (2021): 1–21.
• “The Battle of the Bards:  Canings and Unchivalrous Masculinity.” Essays in Romanticism 27.2 (2020): 187–205.
• “New Directions in Godwin Studies.” European Romantic Review 30.4 (2019): 347–51.
• “Memoirs of Mrs. Mary Robinson (1801).” Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives. 2. vols. Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2019. 2: 492–96.
• “Female Dueling and Women’s Rights.” Essays in Romanticism 24.1 (2017): 1–20.
• “Mary Robinson’s Paralysis and the Discourse of Disability.” In Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text. Ed. Michael Bradshaw. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. 105–126.
• (ed.) The Children of the Abbey, by Regina Maria Roche. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books, 2016.
• Staging Romantic Chameleons and Imposters. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015
• (general ed.) The Works of Mary Robinson, 8 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009-2010.
• (ed.) Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, by Mary Robinson. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
• (co-ed. with Sharon Setzer) Miscellaneous Prose and Dramas, by Mary Robinson. The Works of Mary Robinson, Vol. 8. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010.
• "Representations of Race and Miscegenation." In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Drama). Ed. Frederick Burwick. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• "Mary Robinson as Playwright." In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (Drama). Ed. Frederick Burwick. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• "Copies, Protean Role-Players, and Sappho's Shattered Form in Mary Robinson's The False Friend," European Romantic Review 22.6 (2011): 785-800.
• "Charlotte Smith's Celestina and the Rousseauvian Moral Self," The Eighteenth-Century Novel, vol. 8. New York: AMS Press, 2011. 227-246.
• "Egalitarianism in Mary Robinson's Metropolis," The Wordsworth Circle 41.3 (Summer 2010): 146-50.
• "The Liberating and Debilitating Imagination in Joanna Baillie's Orra and The Dream," in Utopianism and Joanna Baillie, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (July 2008): n. pag. Online. Internet.
• (ed.) St. Leon, by William Godwin. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006.
• "Mary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastrophe," European Romantic Review 17.3 (July 2006): 265–273.
• "The French Revolution as a Romance: Mary Robinson's Hubert de Sevrac," Papers on Language & Literature 42.2 (Spring 2006): 115–149.
• "Transgendering in Matthew Lewis's The Monk ," Gothic Studies , 6.2 (November 2004): 192–207.
• "Felicia Hemans, Byronic Cosmopolitanism, and the Ancient Bards." In English Romanticism and the Celtic World . Ed. Gerrard Carruthers and Alan Rawes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 167–181.
• "Charlotte Smith and the American Agrarian Ideal," English Language Notes , 40.4 (June 2003): 51–61.
• "Subverting Individuality: Mary Robinson and Polygraphs." In Inventing the Individual . Ed. Larry H. Peer. Provo, Utah: International Conference on Romanticism, 2002. 17–26.
• The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley . Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.
• (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Lord Byron . Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.
• (co-ed. with Jay Losey) Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.
• (co-ed. with Carole Lambert) Essays on the Modern Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
• "Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Ideological Affinities." In Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Ed. Laura Dabundo. University Press of America, 2000. 97–108.
• "Male Rivalry and Friendship in the Novels of William Godwin." In Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England . 49–68.
• "William Godwin, Chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck ," Papers on Language & Literature , 35.2 (Spring 1999): 187–205.
• "Unnationalized Englishmen in Mary Shelley's Fiction," Romanticism On the Net , 11 (August 1998): n. pag. Online. Internet.
• "Mary Shelley on the Therapeutic Value of Language," in Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , ed. Mary Lowe-Evans. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 152–165 (reprint of an article previously published in Papers on Language & Literature.