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Walter ReedProfessor Emeritus

Biography

Walter Reed received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale and taught in the English Department there until 1976. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin, teaching in the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program until 1987, when he came to Emory as Chair of the English Department. At Emory, he has also been Director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum and is currently Director of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and William R. Kenan, Jr. University Professor.

Reed's primary field of interest is British Romanticism, but he has also written on the history and theory of the novel, literary theory in general (with particular attention to the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin), and on the Bible as literature and the relations of literature and religion. His current research deals with the construction of character in literature of the Romantic period and the theory and history of reading.

Publications

  • Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 223 pp.

  • An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 334 pp.

  • Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, 207 pp.

  • Personalities as Dramatis Personae: An Interdisciplinary Examination of the Self as Author (with Marshall Duke), Common Knowledge 11 (2005), 502-513.