What Are You Reading?: Tricia Matthew
Today we continue our 'What are you reading?' series by presenting an interview with Tricia Matthew, Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. Tricia Matthew is the co-editor of a special issue for the Romantic Pedagogy Commons entitled Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic Era Fiction, editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), and is currently writing a monograph about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist literature.
What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?
I'm currently reading The Illustrated Slave by Martha J. Cutter (Georgia UP, 2017), Contested Bodies by Sasha Turner (Pennsylvania, 2017), Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes (Routledge, 2016), and Annie Persons' recent essay in Women’s Writing “Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and Human Commodification in the Literary Market Place.” I’m also reading a chapter from Deanna Koretsky’s book-in-progress Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
I'm on research leave, so all of my reading these days is for my book-in-progress. Some of it will make its way into my teaching
What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your PhD thesis/first monograph/most recent monograph?
As a graduate student Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction really helped me see where my critical interventions could fit and offered a wonderful model about what questions to ask about the history of the novel. I also just loved Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. It shaped my thinking about how to read through canonical crevices.
The first book project I worked on (I decided to publish the chapters as articles instead) was informed by Alan Richardson's British Romanticism and the Science of the Mindand Miranda Burgess’ British Fiction and the Production of Social Order.
For my current book on sugar, gender, and the history of the novel, Debbie Lee's Slavery and the Romantic Imagination has been essential.
What books are in your 'to read next' pile right now? (poetry, fiction, theory, anything!)
I have Joanna Gohman’s “Colonizing through Clay: A Case Study of the Pineapple in British Material Culture” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction to read. There’s also a new essay onThe Woman of Colour, A Tale I just downloaded.
I pre-ordered Stephanie Hershinow's Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2019) and then begged her to let me see the proofs because I need it for an essay I have in the works.
I’m planning to reread Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric side-by-side to see what happens.
Watchmen, a gift from some students in my Fall 2018 Intro to Theory class, is on my list. It's not technically, "right now," but I got to read a lot of Matt Sandler’s forthcoming book The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Politics in the Civil War Era and Beyond (Verso Books) last year and am very excited to see how it turned out.
What books are on your night table or desk?
On my night table: A bad, trashy romance novel my friend bought for a group of us for my birthday last year. It's awful. Not even campy. I'll never finish it.
On my work table: A pretty big stack (about 20) for the two book chapters I drafted this semester. They include Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Kim Hall's Things of Darkness, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw's Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Candide, and The Black Jacobins.
Stacked near the couch: Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind and the gorgeous, indispensable Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement by Kay Dian Kriz.
On my laptop: sugar poems I’m finding in various digital archives.
On my Kindle: Villanelle (“Killing Eve” is based on it) because my dad and I were curious about it.
Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you’d like to draw our attention to?
I thought Jill Lepore's New Yorker essay on Frankenstein was just terrific. I ended up assigning it to my students last spring. Alison Kinney has an interesting reflection on Frankenstein and revision on Avidly. Courtney Thorsson’s recent piece on Public Books (“Fairy Tales of Nation and Race”) is not about Romanticism, but I think it’s just so rich and well crafted, a really great model of what I like about “public” humanities work. I read whatever essays Devoney Looser and Eugenia Zuroski write.