ROBERT C. EVANS

CURRICLUM VITAE

I. B. YOUNG PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

AUBURN UNIVERSITY AT MONTGOMERY

Representative Reviews and Citations:

http://tinyurl.com/RCEvans

[RECENT MISCELLANEOUS REVIEWS BELOW]

Education 1978 84 Ph.D., Princeton University / 1973 77 B.A., magna cum laude, University of Pittsburgh

Fellowships: Richard M. Weaver Fellowship / Princeton University Fellowship / Whiting Foundation / Newberry Library / American Council of Learned Societies / Folger Shakespeare Library / Mellon Foundation / Huntington Library / National Endowment for the Humanities / American Philosophical Society / UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Awards: G. E. Bentley Prize / 1989 Professor of the Year for Alabama, Council for the Advancement and Support of Education / AUM Faculty Excellence Award / AUM Distinguished Research Professor / AUM University Alumni Professor / AUM Distinguished Teaching Professor / Director, two-year Mellon seminar on critical pluralism / Departmental Award for Collaborative Work with Students / Keynote speaker, Utah Shakespearean Festival / Professor of the Year, South Atlantic Association of Departments of English

University Appointments: Past Preceptor, Honors Program / Past Director of the Learning Center / Interim Department Head, Department of English and Philosophy

External Service: Senior editor of the Ben Jonson Journal / past member of the editorial board of Explorations in Renaissance Culture / editor for Renaissance drama and book review editor, Comparative Drama / service on National Awards Committee, American Association of University Women / editorial board, Iter/MRTS Bibliography of English Writers, 1500-1640 / editorial board of Renaissance English Texts Society / contributing editor, Donne Variorum Edition / South Atlantic Review Prize Committee

Books: Author or editor of more than fifty books (on such topics as Ben Jonson, Martha Moulsworth, Kate Chopin, John Donne, Frank O'Connor, Brian Friel, Ambrose Bierce, Amy Tan, early modern women writers, pluralist literary theory, literary criticism, twentieth-century American writers, American novelists, and seventeenth-century English literature)

Articles and notes: Author of roughly four hundred published or forthcoming essays or notes on a variety of topics, especially dealing with Renaissance literature, critical theory, women writers, short fiction, and American literature

Other: Profiled in Contemporary Authors

http://robertcevanscurriculumvitaelatest.blogspot.com/2013/03/robert-c-evans-auburn-university.html

RECENT MISCELLANEOUS REVIEWS:

Review of The Critical Reception of Flannery O'Connor: Robert C. Evans’s The Critical Reception of Flannery O’Connor, 1952–

2017: “Searchers and Discoverers” (Camden House) presents a chronological and topical overview of the “developments in O’Connor criticism” in the past 65 years. The volume demonstrates “how various critics have addressed specific aspects of O’Connor’s works, including her artistry, her theological concerns, her historical contexts, and her treatment of such topics as region, gender, and race.” Evans includes some 700 items, focusing primarily on scholarly monographs and essay collections but also treating “representative” critical articles, especially those published in the Flannery O’Connor Review, and seeking to go beyond the work of such previous O’Connor bibliographers as Robert E. Golden, R. Neil Scott, Irwin H. Streight, and Daniel Moran. In his conclusion Evans advocates for “an ongoing, online, ‘variorum’ edition of O’Connor’s works” and questions “what will happen to [O’Connor’s] place in the canon” in the future as readership changes and “readers have less and less

in common with O’Connor intellectually and theologically.” - American Literary Scholarship

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Review of recent essay on Ben Jonson's THE SAD SHEPHERD. Finally, one article has analysed Jonson’s fragmentary and neglected play The Sad Shepherd. In ‘Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd, the Theme of Compassion, and the Robin Hood Canon’ (in Coote and Kaufman, eds., Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, pp. 132–49), Robert C. Evans offers quite a comprehensive commentary on the play. He is particularly concerned with Jonson’s portrayal of Robin Hood, Marian, and their companions, notwithstanding the modest number of lines spoken by the characters. He considers the characters’ differences with respect to the earlier traditional Robin Hood texts; the greater role played by women; Jonson’s emphasis on virtues such as ‘generosity, friendship, fellow-feeling, and kindness’ (p. 134), and Robin’s limited ambiguity in that respect; the importance of moral worth; anti-Puritan criticism; the hero and heroine’s overall genuine and courteous love (with one exception, when Marian’s role is usurped by a wicked witch in disguise); and Robin’s generally compassionate and patient attitude to everyone. He is the type of Robin that ‘would have appealed to many of the most important people of Jonson’s day’ (p. 146). - YWES

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Review of AN COLLINS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION, edited by W. Scott Howard. "Although An Collins’s devotional and meditative lyric poetry has already received scholarly attention in the past few years, the collection of ten essays edited by W. Scott Howard is the first comprehensive assessment of her spiritual autobiography, Divine Songs and Meditations. Readers who are not familiar with Collins’s work may wish to start with the final chapter, in which Robert C. Evans describes in great detail the material history and legacy of the book." - Modern Language Review

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Review of WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN: A CRITICAL GUIDE, edited by Andrew Hiscock. "In the first chapter, Robert C. Evans gives a detailed spectrum of responses to this play, dating from the Romantic and Victorian periods until 1995. With reference to a variety of commentaries, annotations, and recurring critical concerns Evans stresses that the play is a criticism of the state of the "education of women" and the notion of a "marriage of convenience." - Sixteenth Century Journal

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Review of VOLPONE: A CRITICAL GUIDE, edited by Matthew Steggle

"Robert C. Evans deals interestingly with Jonson's multiple sources, noting that Jonson deviates from Roman comedies in the harshness of the final judgments and observing Jonson's heartless contempt for his characters; he appropriates Marcel Maus's theory of gift-giving to note how Volpone fails in his obligation to observe reciprocity—and how his worship of the expensive gifts in his shrine amounts to that ultimate taboo for Protestants, idolatry." - Sixteenth Century Journal

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Review of BILLY BUDD: CRITICAL INSIGHTS, edited by Brian Yothers

The volume’s “Critical Responses” section is strong and various. … Robert C. Evans surveys editions of Billy Budd released in the 1920s through the 1960s in order to trace how different editorial philosophies and textual apparatuses have driven evolving interpretations of the work itself (“Editions of Melville’s Billy Budd: The First Forty Years,” pp. 159–77). American Literary Scholarship 2017

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Review of ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN: CRITICAL INSIGHTS, edited by R. Kent Rasmussen

In “Is Huckleberry Finn a Picaresque Novel?” (pp. 146–63) Robert C. Evans asks the “picaresque” question. The short answer is “yes,” but he takes a comprehensive look at a slippery and often misused term. His 33 criteria for “picaresque” provide a helpful taxonomy for analysis of the novel’s relationship to the genre. American Literary Scholarship 2017

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Review of ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN: CRITICAL INSIGHTS, edited by R. Kent Rasmussen

In "Is Huckleberry Finn a Picaresque Novel?" Robert Evans lays an extensive foundation for why it can be so regarded. Leading picaresque authority Ulrich Wicks provides thirty-three characteristics of picaresque fiction and Evans comments on how each applies to the novel.- Twainweb.net

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Review of RICHARD WRIGHT: CRITICAL INSIGHTS, edited by Kimberley Drake

Drake is a recognized scholar of African American literature, and in this stellar collection she brings together fresh critical insights on one of the most important American intellectuals of the 20th century. Divided into two sections, “Critical Contexts” and “Critical Readings,” the book provides a wide spectrum of perspectives on Wright (1908–60). For example, Robert Evans dissects Wright's autobiographical essay "I Tried to Be a Communist" to shed light on how and why Wright rejected American communism ....

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Review of ESSAY ON BEN JONSON'S THE SAD SHEPHERD:

Finally, one article has analysed Jonson’s fragmentary and neglected play The Sad Shepherd. In ‘Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd, the Theme of Compassion, and the Robin Hood Canon’ (in Coote and Kaufman, eds., Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon, pp. 132–49), Robert C. Evans offers quite a comprehensive commentary on the play. He is particularly concerned with Jonson’s portrayal of Robin Hood, Marian, and their companions, notwithstanding the modest number of lines spoken by the characters. He considers the characters’ differences with respect to the earlier traditional Robin Hood texts; the greater role played by women; Jonson’s emphasis on virtues such as ‘generosity, friendship, fellow-feeling, and kindness’ (p. 134), and Robin’s limited ambiguity in that respect; the importance of moral worth; anti-Puritan criticism; the hero and heroine’s overall genuine and courteous love (with one exception, when Marian’s role is usurped by a wicked witch in disguise); and Robin’s generally compassionate and patient attitude to everyone. He is the type of Robin that ‘would have appealed to many of the most important people of Jonson’s day’ (p. 146). - Year's Work in English Studies

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