Robert Mayer

author and editor of Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman

November 4, 2015

Robert Mayer is Professor of English and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge 1997) and the editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen (Cambridge 2002). He has published essays on early modern historiography, the theory of the novel, and film adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, is a founding member of the Defoe Society, and is working on a study of Sir Walter Scott in the literary marketplace.

Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms, a collection of twelve essays by colleagues, students, and friends of Everett Zimmerman, treats four topics that Zimmerman explored during his career: the representation of the self in narratives, the early British novel and related forms, their epistemological and generic borders, and their intellectual and cultural contexts. The collection is divided into two sections: "Boundaries" and "Forms." The essays in "Boundaries" explore how epistemological and narrative distinctions between history and fiction meet or overlap in the novel's relationship to other forms, including providential history, travel narratives, uptopias, autobiography, and visual art. In "Forms," the contributors investigate fictional, historical, and material forms; the impact those cultural phenomena had on the meaning and value attributed to literary works; and how such forms arose in response to historical conditions. The essays describe the historical range of Zimmerman's work, beginning with Defoe and ending with Coetzee, and treat such key writers of the long eighteenth century as Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Austen, and Scott.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2009-honorees/robert-mayer

Last Updated: 9 December 2015