Dr Andrew Lawson

Reader
School of Cultural Studies & Humanities
0113 81 23369 A.Lawson@leedsbeckett.ac.ukAbout Dr Andrew Lawson
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 Publications
Journal articles (9)
- Lawson A (2020) Smith vs. Wingfield: Remaking the Social Order in the Chesapeake
View Repository Record - Lawson A (2020) Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin's Account of the Self
https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0015
View Repository Record - Lawson A (2013) Foreclosure Stories: Neoliberal Suffering in the Great Recession
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875812001326 - Lawson A (2013) An Emotional History of the Business Cycle
https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2012.745445 - Lawson A (2012) Moby-Dick and the American empire
https://doi.org/10.1179/1477570011Z.0000000003 - Lawson A (2011) "Perpetual capital": Roderick Hudson, aestheticism, and the problem of inheritance
https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2011.0010 - Lawson A (2011) William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words
https://doi.org/10.1163/156920611x573851 - Lawson A (2010) Men of Small Property: Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the Antebellum Markethttp://www.common-place.org/vol-10/no-04/lawson/
- Lawson A (2005) The red badge of class: Stephen Crane and the industrial army
https://doi.org/10.7227/LH.14.2.4
Books (4)
- Lawson A (2013) Class and The Making of American Literature: Created Unequal. London and New York: Routledge.
- Lawson A (2012) Downwardly MobileThe Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199828050.001.0001 - Lawson A (2012) Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press, USA.http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/?view=usa&ci=9780199828050
- Lawson A (2006) Walt Whitman and the class struggle. University Of Iowa Press.http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2006-spring/walwhi.htm
Chapters (2)
- Lawson A (2011) Twain, Class, and The Gilded Cage. In: Cassuto L The Cambridge History of the American Novel. : Cambridge University Press, pp. 365-379.
- Lawson A (2009) Early Literary Modernism. In: Matthews JT A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900 - 1950. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 365-379.