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Daniel Novak

Daniel A. Novak

Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies

Education

  • Ph.D, Princeton University, 2002

Research Areas

  • 19th-Century British Literature
  • Visual Culture

Bio

Daniel Novak specializes in Victorian literature and culture. His research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century visual culture, race studies, and gender and sexuality studies.  He is author of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and co-editor of ‘Masculinity Lessons’: Rethinking Men’s and Women’s Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).  His essays have appeared in journals such as Representations, Novel, Victorian Studies, and Criticism. He is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Victoria’s Accursed Race explores Victorian literature on the Cagots–an ethnic group of unknown origin and ambiguous race found in France and Spain. The second, Specters of Wilde focuses on the development of Wilde Studies in the early decades of the 20th century. Before coming to The University of Alabama, he taught at Tulane University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Mississippi.

Selected Publications

Books

  • Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 2008
  • James Catano and Daniel A. Novak, Ed. ‘Masculinity Lessons’: Rethinking Men’s and Women’s Studies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011

Selected Articles and Essays

  • “Caught in the Act: Photography on the Victorian Stage,” Victorian Studies 59:1 (Autumn 2016), 35-64.
  • “Performing the ‘Wilde West’: Victorian Afterlives, Sexual Performance, and the American West,” Victorian Studies 54:3 (Spring 2012), 451-463.
  • “‘Shapeless Deformity’: Monstrosity, Gender, and Racial Masquerade in Thomas Grattan’s Cagot’s Hut,” in: Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology (Palgrave, 2012), 83-96.
  • “A Literature of its Own: Time, Space, and Narrative Meditations in Victorian Photography,” in: Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch (Ashgate, 2011), 65-90.
  • “Picturing Wilde: Christopher Millard’s ‘Iconography of Oscar WIlde,'” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (32.4, 2010), 305-335.
  • “Photographic Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Photography and the Novel-Form,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43:1 (Spring 2010), 23-30.
  • “Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Oscar Wilde, Photography, and Identity, Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend, Ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio University Press, 2009), 63-95.
  • “Labors of Likeness: Photograpahy and Labor in Capital,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 49: 2, Spring 2007, 125-150.
  • “A Model Jew: ‘Literary Photography’ and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda,” Representations 85 (Winter 2004), 58-97.
  • “‘If Re-Collecting were Forgetting’: Forged Bodies and Forgotten Labor in Little Dorrit,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31:1 (Fall 1997), 21-44

Reviews

  • Published in Victorian Studies, Novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, RaVoN, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, Religion and Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and Studies in the Novel