Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Andrew Lawson
Reader
Andrew's background is in the interdisciplinary study of American literature and history, with a particular focus on the history of capitalism in the United States and the formation of the middle class. His first book explores the tensions and ambiguities of Walt Whitman's lower-middle-class identity; a recent study of American realism shows how a literary genre central to middle-class culture emerged as a response to the instabilities of the nineteenth century economy.
Andrew’s first book was Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (University of Iowa Press, 2006). He has also published Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011), and edited a collection of essays, Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal (Routledge, 2014).
Current Teaching
- Writing America and Modern American Drama (BA English Literature)
- Neoliberal Fictions (MA in Contemporary Literatures)
Research Interests
Andrew's work has contributed to a new awareness of class in American literary and cultural history. He is currently editing a collection of essays by established and emerging scholars on this theme, Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, to be published by Routledge.
Andrew’s current research project is “Speculating on the Self,” an interdisciplinary study of how a capitalist economy and culture developed in America from the colonial period to the early nineteenth century.
Selected Outputs
-
Lawson A (2012) Downwardly MobileThe Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press.
-
Lawson A (2012) Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press, USA.
-
Lawson A (2006) Walt Whitman and the class struggle. University Of Iowa Press.
-
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.
-
Lawson A (2020) Smith vs. Wingfield: Remaking the Social Order in the Chesapeake. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 128 (3), pp. 202-225.
-
Lawson A (2020) Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin's Account of the Self. ELH: English Literary History, 87 (2), pp. 463-489.
-
Lawson A (2012) Moby-Dick and the American empire. Comparative American Studies, 10 (1), pp. 45-62.
-
Lawson A (2011) "Perpetual capital": Roderick Hudson, aestheticism, and the problem of inheritance. Henry James Review, 32 (2), pp. 178-191.
-
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.
Other people in this area
-
![Leeds Beckett Logo]()
Dr Caroline Herbert
Course Director / School of Cultural Studies & Humanities -
![James McGrath]()
Dr James McGrath
Senior Lecturer / School of Cultural Studies & Humanities -
![Leeds Beckett Logo]()
Dr Aaron Andrews
Research Officer / School of Cultural Studies & Humanities
