Biography
Marshall Brown has written five books on European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the intersection of form with literary and cultural history. He also works on music and literature; his latest book is a collection of previously published and new studies entitled ‘The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul’: Essays on Music and Poetry. Two future books under way are How Do Poems Think? and The Romance of Real Life: On the Form of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. As editor since 1991 of Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, he has promoted new directions in the study of literary history. Four collections from the journal have appeared in book form, most recently Reading for Form from the University of Washington Press. Prof. Brown has also edited the Romanticism volume of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and the European Romanticism section of the Longman Anthology of World Literature and has translated (with Jane K. Brown) The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays by Harald Weinrich. He has served on numerous editorial boards and MLA division executive committees and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Deutsche Forschungsmeinschaft, and the Rockefeller Foundation.