Dorice Williams Elliott
- Professor Emerita
Contact Info
Personal Links
Biography —
Because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was the site of the first industrial revolution and the center of a vast global empire, I am fascinated with the literature it produced and the cultural work performed by that literature. I’m particularly interested in the ways that gender and class were constructed in this intriguing period. Besides the published research listed above, I’ve also taught classes or presented papers on Jane Austen, Sarah Scott, Hannah More, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Victorian mental science, the sensation novel, Anglo-Indian and Indian literature, and narrative theory. I also routinely teach the Department’s Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism course.
Research —
Areas of Research
Literature and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and Australia; transnational literature; the novel; women's literature and gender studies; social class relations; historical criticism, cultural studies, and literary theory
Selected Publications —
Transported to Botany Bay: Class, Nation, and the Literary Figure of the Australian Convict. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019.
The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002.
"One Gentleman in Gray Equals Another: Class in The Silence of Dean Maitland." Critical Edition of The Silence of Dean Maitland by Maxwell Gray. Ed. Kevin Morrison. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. 348-354.
"Lady Bountiful for the Empire: Upper-class Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society." Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850-1920. Eds. Leslee Thorne-Murphy and Frank Q. Christianson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017. 114-138.
"Transported to Botany Bay: Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 43.2 (June 2015): 235-59.
"Gifts Always Come with Strings Attached: Teaching Mansfield Park in the Context of Gift Theory.” MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park. Ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire. New York: Modern Language Association, 2014. 50-59.
“Charles Reade: The British 'Harriet Beecher Stowe' and the Affect of Sensation,” Transatlantic Sensations, eds. Jennifer Phegley, John Barton, and Kristin N. Huston. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2012. 119-36.
"Unsettled Status in Australian Squatter Novels," Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans, and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Tamara Silvia Wagner. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. 23-40.
“Class Act: Servants and Mistresses in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell,” Elizabeth Gaskell; Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Essays for the Bicentenary, ed. Sandro Jung. Ghent, Belgium and Lebanon, NH: Academia Press, 2010. 113-130.
“The Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer’s Oeconomy of Charity and the Sunday School Movement,” The Culture of the Gift, eds. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 107-22.
“Convict Servants and Middle-Class Mistresses,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 16, no. 2 (2005): 163-187.
“Ways of Teaching about Free Indirect Discourse in Emma.” MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma. Ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom. New York: Modern Language Association, 2004. 120-126.
“Servants and Hands: Conflicting Class Loyalties in Victorian Factory Novels,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2000): 377-390.
"The Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49 (June 1994): 21-49.
Awards & Honors —
Friends of the Hall Center for Humanities Book Publication Award, 2019
Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship, 2016-2019
Shirley Cundiff Haines and Jordan L. Haines Faculty Research Fellowship in English, 2012
Hall Center for the Humanities Research Fellow, 2011
W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, 2010
Senior Administrative Fellow, University of Kansas, 2006-07
Mabel Fry Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, University of Kansas, 2001