Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Andrew Lawson
Reader
Andrew has published widely in the field of American literary and cultural studies. His research articles have appeared in a range of journals including Textual Practice, Literature and History, American Literature, American Literary History, The Journal of Cultural Economy, The Journal of American Studies, and ELH.
Andrew's first book, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa University Press, 2006) explores the ways in which Whitman’s poetry reflects the problems of defining class identity in nineteenth-century America. A second book, Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (Oxford University Press, 2011), shows how a literary genre central to middle-class culture emerged as a response to the instabilities of the nineteenth-century economy.
Andrew is also the editor of a collection of essays, Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal (Routledge, 2014).
Current Teaching
- Nineteenth-Century Contexts
- Modern American Drama
- Neoliberal Fictions
Research Interests
Andrew's current book project is Personal Capitalism: Making Friends and Making Money in Early America, which applies the techniques of literary studies to a close reading of merchant correspondence between the early seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries so as to understand how merchant networks on both sides of the Atlantic created today’s global market.
Andrew welcomes inquiries from research students interested in any aspect of American literature and American cultural history.
Ask Me About
- History
- Literature
Selected Outputs
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Lawson A (2011) Twain, Class, and The Gilded Cage. In: Cassuto L ed. The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Cambridge University Press, pp. 365-379.
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Lawson A (2021) Improving the Self : Francis Bacon’s Essays and the Cultural Logic of Agrarian Capitalism. College Literature, 48 (1), pp. 112-142.
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Lawson A (2020) Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin's Account of the Self. English Literary History, 87 (2), pp. 463-489.
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Lawson A (2020) Smith vs. Wingfield: Remaking the Social Order in the Chesapeake. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 128 (3), pp. 202-225.
https://www.virginiahistory.org/collections/virginia-magazine-history-biography/current-vmhb-issue
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Lawson A (2019) Writing a Bill of Exchange: The Perils of Pearl Street, The Adventures of Harry Franco, and the Antebellum Credit System. Journal of American Studies
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Lawson A (2012) Moby-Dick and the American empire. Comparative American Studies, 10 (1), pp. 45-62.
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Lawson A (2011) "Perpetual capital": Roderick Hudson, aestheticism, and the problem of inheritance. Henry James Review, 32 (2), pp. 178-191.
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Lawson A (2010) Men of Small Property: Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the Antebellum Market. Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, 10 (4), pp. 178-191.
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Lawson A (2012) Downwardly MobileThe Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press.
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Lawson A (2012) Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press, USA.
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Lawson A (2006) Walt Whitman and the class struggle. University Of Iowa Press.
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