Walter ReedWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. University Professor of English Emeritus

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 was 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 research deals with the construction of character in literature of the Romantic period and the theory and history of reading.

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

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

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

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