Resume

• 2008

  Sean

  O'Toole

  Baruch College

  CUNY

  Teaching Interests:\nNineteenth-century British literature and society\nHistory and theory of the novel\nThe nineteenth-century novel\nGender and sexuality\nPsychology and literature in England

  1840-1900\nModernism\n\nCourses Taught:\nWriting I & II\nGreat Works of Literature II\nIntroduction to Literary Studies (new course developed)\nSurvey of English Literature II\nNineteenth-Century Novel\nJames Joyce (late-semester substitute: Ulysses)\nTopics in Literature: Notorious

  Scandalous

  Wilde (new course developed); reprised as Aestheticism and Decadence: Oscar Wilde and His Contexts\nTopics in Literature: Law and Literature (new course developed)\nAdvanced Essay Writing: Style and Styles in Prose

  Baruch College

  CUNY

• 2006

  Princeton University

  Courses Taught:\nVictorian Scandals\nWilde at Heart

  Princeton University

• 1992

  Georgetown University

  BA

  College of Arts and Sciences

  The Graduate Center

  City University of New York

  PhD

  English Literature

  Université Paris IV-Sorbonne; Institut d'Etudes Politiques

• English Literature

  Teaching

  Research

  Literature

  Literary Criticism

  Higher Education

  Habit in the English Novel

  1850-1900

  \"This fascinating study explores how changing attitudes to habit in the latter part of the nineteenth century had profound fictional and theoretical implications. Habit in the English Novel

  1850-1900 includes some striking and original analysis of nineteenth century literature

  and alerts us to the complexity and profound significance of an apparently ordinary and ubiquitous human trait. This is an important book

  which raises key questions about the relationship between literature and psychology

  and casts new light on familiar material.\"--Jenny Bourne Taylor

  University of Sussex

  UK\n\n\"Sean O'Toole's insightful new book ... reinvigorates our perception of the richly textured and surprising ways in which habit shapes character in the nineteenth-century English novel.\"--Anne Ryan

  Review 19

  http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=333\n\nThe ancient philosophical concept of habit fixated and unsettled the Victorians in profoundly new ways

  as advances in physiology and evolutionary theory sparked far-reaching debates about the threat of automatism and the proper mental training of the will. This book suggests that nineteenth-century novelists not only echoed these debates but intervened in them in unique

  transformative

  and strikingly modern ways. In attending closely to the enabling

  generative potential of habit and its role in the creation of new perceptions and social identities

  novelists from Dickens to James bequeathed a far more complex conception of the category than has yet been acknowledged

  allowing for a rich phenomenology of the unpredictable

  changeable modes of modern existence. Habit in the English Novel

  1850-1900 reconsiders what we have come to assume about the Victorian novel

  including our own critical habits

  in the wake of Freud and cultural modernism.

  Habit in the English Novel

  1850-1900