Frances Ferguson

Frances Ferguson is Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on the literary field of the eighteenth century and Romanticism and its changes over time (the rise of criticism and reviewing, the changes in the relationship between poetry and the novel), the history of reading and practical criticism, the rise of mass education, and the importance of dissent in educated and educational thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992), and Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (Yale University Press, 1977).