Advisory Editors

Professor Steph Newell (University of Sussex )

Professor Diana Brydon (University of Manitoba)

Professor Nick Nesbitt (University of Princeton)

Area Editors

African Literatures and Cultures

Canadian Literature and Culture

Caribbean Literature and Culture

Children's and Young Adult Literature

Chinese Literature and Culture

Czech and Slovak Literature and Culture

English Literature and Culture

French-language Literature and Culture

Greek Literature and Culture (Classical and Hellenistic)

German-language Literatures and Cultures

Hispanic Literatures and Cultures

Irish Literature in English

Italian Literature and Culture

Japanese Literature and Culture

Latin Literature and Culture

Middle Eastern Literatures and Cultures

New Zealand and Pacific Literatures and Cultures

Postcolonial Literatures

Polish Literature and Culture

Russian and Ukrainian Literatures and Cultures

Scandinavian Literatures and Cultures

Scottish Literature and Culture

United States Literature and Culture

Welsh Literature and Culture

*indicates an editor who has retired but whose work remains represented in the Encyclopedia.

The Founding Editors

A list of all the achievements of all our editors would fill a fat volume, so please excuse us offering merely the following profiles of the founding editors as a way of establishing the scholarly bona fides of the enterprise.

Robert Clark is Reader in English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia. Having first studied medicine, then made documentary films, he was trained as a Comparatist at the University of Essex and has since then been studying English, American and French literature, history and social thought since 1688. In 1989 he began to develop database applications and since then has been deepeing his understanding of how they can best be used to serve fellow students and scholars. The Literary Encyclopedia is thus unusual in that it is directed by a scholar who has usually built and tested an application before giving it to the specialists for web publication. In 1994 he began developing The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, now published by Routledge, and he served as its Editorial Director until 2003. ABES now makes available 5m words of critical guidance to what is worth reading on English Studies, and which was judged by the MLA as one of the ‘outstanding publications of 1999’. He has edited with Thomas Healy The Arnold Anthology of British and Irish Writing in English, is the author of History and Myth in American Fiction, edited works by Austen, Fenimore Cooper and Defoe, and edited collections of essays or written essays on The Spectator, Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Angela Carter and Michael Ondaatje. He was Founding Secretary of the European Society for the Study of English (1989-1995), is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Foundation Fellow of the English Association, Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the UK Humanities Hub and has twice been an Executive member of the Council for College and University English in the UK. He has recently edited a volume of essays for Media History about The Spectator and is currently completing a social history of Jane Austen and the transformation of Britain during the French wars.

Emory Elliott (1942-2009) was one of North America’s most distinguished literary historians, an expert on Puritan writing, a notable friend of the nascent discipline of Women's Studies in the 1980s, an early champion of the writing of Toni Morrison, a consistent champion of equality of opportunity, an inspiring teacher and a tireless supporter of younger colleagues. The son of working-class parents, he was the first of his family to achieve a college education (Loyola College, Baltimore; University of Illinois) and rose to become Chair of the American Studies at Princeton, and later chair of the English Department. From 1989 he was Professor of American Literature at the University of California, Riverside, and Director of the Riverside Centre for Ideas and Society. He was nominated to the distinguished rank of University Professor by California University in 2001. He was the author of Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (1975), Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic (1982), American Puritan Literature, Volume One of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1993). He edited the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology (1991), and the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991). He was an NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim and National Humanities Center Fellow, and chair of the American Studies Association. Emory Elliott helped to found The Literary Encyclopedia in 1998 and helped it through its first decade of life.

Janet Todd is President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, and Herbert Grierson Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen. She is a pioneering scholar of women’s writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a critic and biographer of international distinction. She founded the journal Women and Literature in the 1970s and co-founded Women’s Writing in the 1980. She has compiled and edited two dictionaries of British and American women writers. Among other books, she is the author of In Adam’s Garden: A Study of John Clare (1973), Women’s Friendship in Literature (1980), Sensibility: An Introduction (1986), Feminist Literary History (1988), The Sign of Angellica (1989), Gender, Art and Death (1993), and the biographies: Secret life of Aphra Behn (1996), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000); Daughters of Ireland (2006); and Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (2008). She has edited the complete works of Aphra Behn and, with Marilyn Butler, The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Most recently she has been the General Editor of the nine-volume Jane Austen edition published by Cambridge University Press, as well as the editor or co-editor of 3 of the volumes. Her most recent work is the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (2008). She has received awards from the NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim, Leverhulme Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. She has held fellowships at Sidney Sussex and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge, has been president of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has served on the English panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Board.