Daniel Wright

Daniel Wright specializes in the theory and history of the novel, especially nineteenth-century realism and the queer novel; literature and philosophy; feminist, queer, and trans theory; and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of The Grounds of the Novel (forthcoming, Stanford UP) and Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), as well as essays in PMLA, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, ELH, and Public Books. 

He is now at work on an edition of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, under contract for the Norton Library series, as well as a new book project with the working title The Novel of Sexual Ideas.

Professor Wright’s research has been recognized by the UTM Annual Research Prize in the Humanities (2022), a SSHRC Insight Grant (2020), the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature from the Council of Ontario Universities (2016), and a Connaught New Research Award (2014).

Publications

Books

The Grounds of the Novel. Stanford University Press, 2024.

Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Articles

"Thomas Hardy's Groundwork," PMLA 134, no. 5 (Oct. 2019): 1028-41.

“Unhistorical Reading and Mutual Playing,” b2o, special issue, “v21,” edited by Benjamin Morgan and Anna Kornbluh (Fall 2016).

“Let Them Be: Hard Times and Stupid Politics,” Dickens Studies Annual 46 (2015), solicited contribution as part of a special forum on “Stupid Dickens."

“George Eliot’s Vagueness,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 625-48.

“Because I Do: Trollope, Tautology, and Desire,” ELH 80, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 1121-43.