Maia Mcaleavey
Associate Professor; Director of English Literature Core
Biography
Maia McAleavey specializes in the history and form of the novel in English, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century British fiction. Her teaching and research attends closely to the formal features of narrative (plot, character systems, perspective, language) as well as to the cultural forces that shaped, and continue to shape, the perception and reception of those formal features. Her current book project, The Life of the Group: Anti-Individualism and the Nineteenth-Century Chronicle, distinguishes a self-proclaimed genre of nineteenth-century writing, one that was often invoked in titles and authorial prefaces and that encompasses the writing of Walter Scott, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant, among many others. Although the chronicle has often been dismissed as unserious, its apparent formlessness offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel’s classically tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership.