{"id":29,"date":"2024-12-09T10:29:52","date_gmt":"2024-12-09T15:29:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/faculty\/?post_type=cu_faculty&p=29"},"modified":"2026-04-03T04:36:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T08:36:48","slug":"james-elliott","status":"publish","type":"cu_faculty","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/faculty\/profiles\/james-elliott\/","title":{"rendered":"James Elliott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trained as a textual editor in the field of American literature, Professor Elliott has been associated with the Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper for more than 30 years. Besides editing The Prairie and co-editing The Spy, he has contributed much collaborative writing and editing to the project. His scholarship has resulted in the development of reliable texts of Cooper\u2019s works, and the historical\/cultural\/bibliographical research involved provides contexts for examining 19th-century American literature. He has been moving toward a more cultural basis in his teaching and writing, looking at how contemporary theoretical concerns interact with issues of race, class, gender and historicism in both 19th- and 20th-century arenas. Most recently, he has been looking at blogs to theorize the uses of narrative in that popular forum.<\/span><\/p>\n

In over thirty years I have spent in the Clark English Department, I don’t know who’s changed more: the students or myself. Trained at Indiana University in textual criticism, I spent over twenty years as Chief Textual Editor of the Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, collaborating in the production of 18 reliably edited volumes of Cooper’s work, including the Leatherstocking Tales. As that project wound down, I began to re-examine my own scholarly and theoretical outlook, noticing that, though I was educated in the decade of the 1960s, “a period of cultural revolution,” my academic training and work was thoroughly grounded in conventional New Critical principles of textual meaning. In the last ten years, then, I have been shifting my scholarly interest towards a more cultural focus, examining effects of identity politics on late nineteenth-century canonized and non-canonized works. I have shifted from an emphasis on authorial intention to New Historically inflected Cultural Criticism which explores the historical moments of the publication and subsequent receptions of these works, but returns to authorial intention by offering constructions of their authors that can engage us today.<\/p>\n

My seminars include Visions of Representation, which looks at canonized and non-canonized post-Civil War American authors with an eye toward issues of race, class and gender; Contemporary Literary Theory, which tries to give an overview of the various philosophical, social, linguistic and literary theories of interpretation, particularly identity formation; and Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which most recently has taken a New Historical approach towards such works as\u00a0<\/span>Huckleberry Finn<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>The Country of the Pointed Firs<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>The Turn of the Screw<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/span>The Awakening<\/em>. I also pinch-hit in Major American Writers and offer a lower-division “hinge course” in the Short Story, as well as yearly editions of “Introduction to Literature and Composition.” I am also initiating a first-year seminar on “The Literature of Baseball.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","meta":{"cu_faculty_f180_userid":"C05611357","cu_faculty_first_name":"James","cu_faculty_last_name":"Elliott","cu_faculty_employment_status":"Researcher","cu_faculty_rank":"Senior Research Scholar","cu_faculty_position":"Professor
Senior Research Scholar","cu_faculty_phone":"","cu_faculty_email":"jelliott@clarku.edu","cu_faculty_location":"","cu_faculty_about":"

Trained as a textual editor in the field of American literature, Professor Elliott has been associated with the Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper for more than 30 years. Besides editing The Prairie and co-editing The Spy, he has contributed much collaborative writing and editing to the project. His scholarship has resulted in the development of reliable texts of Cooper\u2019s works, and the historical\/cultural\/bibliographical research involved provides contexts for examining 19th-century American literature. He has been moving toward a more cultural basis in his teaching and writing, looking at how contemporary theoretical concerns interact with issues of race, class, gender and historicism in both 19th- and 20th-century arenas. Most recently, he has been looking at blogs to theorize the uses of narrative in that popular forum.<\/span><\/p>\n

In over thirty years I have spent in the Clark English Department, I don't know who's changed more: the students or myself. Trained at Indiana University in textual criticism, I spent over twenty years as Chief Textual Editor of the Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, collaborating in the production of 18 reliably edited volumes of Cooper's work, including the Leatherstocking Tales. As that project wound down, I began to re-examine my own scholarly and theoretical outlook, noticing that, though I was educated in the decade of the 1960s, \"a period of cultural revolution,\" my academic training and work was thoroughly grounded in conventional New Critical principles of textual meaning. In the last ten years, then, I have been shifting my scholarly interest towards a more cultural focus, examining effects of identity politics on late nineteenth-century canonized and non-canonized works. I have shifted from an emphasis on authorial intention to New Historically inflected Cultural Criticism which explores the historical moments of the publication and subsequent receptions of these works, but returns to authorial intention by offering constructions of their authors that can engage us today.<\/p>\n

My seminars include Visions of Representation, which looks at canonized and non-canonized post-Civil War American authors with an eye toward issues of race, class and gender; Contemporary Literary Theory, which tries to give an overview of the various philosophical, social, linguistic and literary theories of interpretation, particularly identity formation; and Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which most recently has taken a New Historical approach towards such works as\u00a0<\/span>Huckleberry Finn<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>The Country of the Pointed Firs<\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>The Turn of the Screw<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/span>The Awakening<\/em>. I also pinch-hit in Major American Writers and offer a lower-division \"hinge course\" in the Short Story, as well as yearly editions of \"Introduction to Literature and Composition.\" I am also initiating a first-year seminar on \"The Literature of Baseball.\"<\/p>","cu_faculty_degrees":"Ph.D. in English,<\/span> Indiana University, 1971\nB.A. in English,<\/span> Stanford University, 1966","cu_faculty_cv":"https:\/\/faculty180.interfolio.com\/public\/download.php?key=SDRwNCtxSUpsamxBQ213WS9ucHFuNnMwT0hzQU11b2RPQkJ2cWc3amxyUmNRdVVXTkF4MU1zaC9YQTA3M3U4dW05cWtDWHBnbE1BZGlldVkrR2Q1dHZsTWxyNTMvK3RXVkh4TWtINUZRcnNUVGNxS0VxR1FMUT09","cu_faculty_links":"[]","cu_faculty_scholarly_interests":"","cu_faculty_scholarly_works":"[{\"activityid\":606,\"fields\":{\"Type\":\"Books and Monographs\",\"Title\":\"The Sea Lions\",\"Series Title\":\"The Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper\",\"Year\":2021,\"Date Published\":\"\",\"Publisher\":\"SUNY Press\",\"Publisher City and State\":\"Albany, New York\",\"Country of Publisher\":\"USA\",\"Volume\":\"\",\"Edition\":\"\",\"Number of Pages\":\"\",\"ISBN\":\"\",\"DOI\":\"\",\"CoAuthor\":null,\"URL\":\"\",\"Description\":\"A Critical Edition of Cooper's late novel as part of the Cooper Edition. It is around the 37th volume in the Edition for which I have had editorial oversight.\",\"Include description in output citation\":0,\"Origin\":\"Manual\"},\"facultyid\":\"C05611357\",\"status\":[{\"id\":606,\"status\":\"In Progress\",\"term\":\"Summer\",\"year\":2020,\"termid\":\"2019\\\/05\",\"listingorder\":1,\"completionorder\":1}],\"userid\":\"C05611357\",\"attachments\":[],\"coauthors_list\":[\"Lance Schachterle\"],\"sort_date\":\"2021-01-01\"},{\"activityid\":643,\"fields\":{\"Type\":\"Books and Monographs\",\"Title\":\"The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground [Revised and Updated]. Hardcover\",\"Series Title\":\"The Edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper\",\"Year\":2019,\"Date Published\":\"2020-05-15\",\"Publisher\":\"SUNY Press\",\"Publisher City and State\":\"Albany, New York\",\"Country of Publisher\":\"USA\",\"Volume\":\"\",\"Edition\":\"\",\"Number of Pages\":\"551 (Hardbound and Paperback)\",\"ISBN\":\"978-1-1-4384-78951 (Hardbound); 978-1-4384-7896-8 (Softcover)\",\"DOI\":\"\",\"CoAuthor\":null,\"URL\":\"\",\"Description\":\"A reprint, revised and updated, of the hardcover edition published by AMS Press in 2002, makes available for classroom and other purposes the only scholarly edition of Cooper's ground-breaking depiction of "American Manners an American scenes." This edition includes the original textual examination of the emendations Cooper m=made between the first edition of December 1821 and his final revised text of 1849.\\nHistorical Introduction by James P. Elliott; text established by James P. Elliott, Lance Schachterle, and Jeffrey Walker. Explanatory Notes by James H. Pickering.\",\"Include description in output citation\":0,\"Origin\":\"Manual\"},\"facultyid\":\"C05611357\",\"status\":[{\"id\":643,\"status\":\"Completed\\\/Published\",\"term\":\"Spring\",\"year\":2019,\"termid\":\"2018\\\/03\",\"listingorder\":6,\"completionorder\":6}],\"userid\":\"C05611357\",\"attachments\":[],\"coauthors_list\":[\"James P. Elliott\",\"Lance Schachterle\",\"James H Pickering\",\"Jeffrey Walker\"],\"sort_date\":\"2020-05-15\"},{\"activityid\":1089,\"fields\":{\"Type\":\"Books and Monographs\",\"Title\":\"The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground [Revised and Updated]. 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Elliott\",\"Lance Schachterle\",\"Jeffrey Walker\"],\"sort_date\":\"2019-9-01\"}]","cu_faculty_awards_and_grants":"","cu_faculty_title":"Professor, English
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