Beth Newman

Beth Newman focuses on Victorian literature, and also teaches fiction, poetry and feminist theory. Her book Subjects on Display (2004) explored the contradictions of Victorian femininity and the “gaze” from a psychoanalytic perspective. She has also published on language and class in the nineteenth century, and on A. C. Swinburne’s metrical theory and practice. She is now working in secularity studies, with an emphasis on Jews in later nineteenth-century society.

Selected Publications

• “The Secular Messianism of Robert Elsmere: Race, Jewishness, and the ‘New Reformation,” Victorian Studies 65.1 (Autumn 2022), 93-116.
• “‘So Much Too Little’: Alice Meynell, Walter Pater, and the Question of Influence.” In Joseph Bristow, ed., Extraordinary Aesthetes (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2023), 155-177.
• “Swinburne among the Hexametrists,” Victorian Poetry 54.2 (Summer 2016), 221-242.
• Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë). Bedford Books, 2014 (2nd edition; teaching edition)
• Wuthering Heights (by Emily Brontë). Broadview Press, 2007 (teaching edition)
• Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Ohio University Press, 2004).

Recent Courses Taught

• ENGL 4343; 3344: Victorian Gender and Sexuality
• ENGL 4343: Victorian Multi-Plot Novel
• ENGL 4343: Gender at the Fin de Siècle
• ENGL 2311:Poetry
• ENGL 2312: Fiction
• ENGL 7343: Realism in Theory and Practice