Denise Gigante, Professor

Primary Office: 460-329
Office Hours: On Leave 2012-13
Office Phone: 650-725-7080

At Stanford Since: 2000

Email: [email protected]

Degrees:

B.A., Yale University, 1987

M.A., Princeton University, 1997

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2000

Denise Gigante teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on Romanticism (1750-1850). Her interests include poetry and poetics; the English essay tradition; taste, gastronomy, and aesthetic theory; life writing, and life science in relation to the concepts of vitality and self-generation; the history of the book; transatlantic Romanticism; and the cultural legacy of belles lettres.  She is currently at work on The Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America, which combines the bibliographical method with the biographical in order to explore the passion for books in mid-nineteenth-century America, through the lens of Charles Lamb's library. She is the author, most recently, of The Keats Brothers The Life of John and George, a biography of the English poet and his pioneer brother, published by Harvard University Press and selected as a New York Times Editor's Choice and Notable Book of 2011. She has published two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008), a collection of periodical essays from the long eighteenth century, and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005). Her other publications include Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and essays on Milton (Diacritics), Blake (Nineteenth-Century Literature), Coleridge (European Romantic Review), Keats (PMLA), Sartre and Beckett (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net), Tennyson (NCL), Mary Shelley (ELH), and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (New Literary History), among other things. She is currently a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.