Professor Emeritus
School of Humanities

Victorian Literature and Culture; The Novel; Literature and Science; Theory of Fictions; Literature and Ethics

Robert Newsom holds degrees from Cambridge (B.A., M.A.) and Columbia (B.A., Ph.D.) Universities and taught at Columbia and UC Riverside before coming to UCI. He has written about the uncanny in a book on Dickens's Bleak House: (Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things, 1977) and about literary probability and make-believe in relation to probability more broadly conceived and theories of fictions (A Likely Story, 1988). His most recent book is Charles Dickens Revisited (2000) for the Twayne's English Authors Series. His current project is editing a long (320,000 word) manuscript written between 1837 and 1873 that memorializes his mother's family in New England between 1620 and about 1840 -- accessible online at the Massachusetts Historical Society: https://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0337. He has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio.

"‘To Scatter Dust’: Fancy and Authenticity in Our Mutual Friend," Dickens Studies Annual, 8 (1980), 39-60.

“Dickens and the Goods,” Contemporary Dickens, Ed. Deirdre David and Eileen Gillooly (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 35-52.

“Teaching Bleak House and Victorian Prose,” Approaches to Teaching Bleak House, Ed. Gordon Bigelow and John O. Jordan (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), 113-19.

Charles Dickens Revisited (New York:Twayne Publishers, 2000)

A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977; rpt. The Dickens Project, UC Sanata Cruz, 1988).

"Fictions of Childhood." The Cambridge Companion to Dickens. Ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

"Athenaeum," "Bentham," "Black, John," "Carlyle, Thomas," "Chadwick, Edwin," "Church of England," "Criticism, biographical," "Dissent, religious," "Evangelicals," "Goldsmith, Oliver," "House, Humphry," "Jews," "The Life of Our Lord," "Mill, John Stuart," "The Morning Chronicle,," "Poor law and poor law reform," "Religion," "Roman Catholics," "Sabbatarianism," "Style of Dickens," "Unitarians," (signed articles), The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens, Ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

"Walks of Life: Administrative," A Companion to Victorian Literature, ed. Herbert F. Tucker, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

"Pickwick in the Utilitarian Sense," Dickens Studies Annual, 23 (1994), 49-72.

"Fear of Fictions" (Dialogue with Kendall L. Walton), Narrative, 2 (1994), 140-151.

"Fiction" (signed article), Collier’s Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan Educational Co., 1991 and subsequent editions).

"Villette, and Bleak House: Authorizing Women," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 46, (1991), 54-81.

"Embodying Dombey: Whole and in Part," Dickens Studies Annual, 18 (1990), 197-219.

"The Hero’s Shame," Dickens Studies Annual, 11 (1983), 1-24.

Dickens Society of America

The Dickens Project, UC Santa Cruz

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2802

Last updated
06/15/2022