Faculty

Deborah Lutz

Associate Professor of English

B.A., University of Colorado at BoulderPh.D., The Graduate Center, CUNY

deborah.lutz@liu.edu

Description

Dr. Deborah Lutz has published widely on Victorian eroticism, pornography, death culture, and collecting. Her first book—The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006)—traces a literary history of characters whose eroticism comes from their dark past and rebellious exile from the comforts of everyday living. Her second book, entitled Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton, 2011), dives into 1860s and ‘70s London and the political freethinking and gender play of two intertwined bohemian groups—the Cannibal Club headed by Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelites with D. G. Rossetti as leader. An interdisciplinary project, this book considers the collaborative work of poets, painters, designers, politicians, and scientists and their impact on the nascent feminist movement and the just-developing awareness of sexual identity rights. Dr. Lutz is currently working on her third book, The Dead Still Among Us: Secular Relics in 19th-Century British Literature and Culture, which mines the seam where literature and material culture meet. This project analyzes the collecting and revering of the artifacts and personal effects of the dead as affirmations that objects held memories and told stories. The love of these keepsakes in the 19th century speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, almost lost to us today. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life—not as generalized memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings whose loss needed to be always remembered.

Specialties

History of Sexuality, Pornography and Erotica; Gender and Gay Studies; Material Culture; Mourning and Death Culture

Publications

• Author, “Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism”(2011)
• Author, “The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative” (2006)
• Author, “Gothic Fictions in the Nineteenth Century,” published in “The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880” (Forthcoming)
• Author, “The Eroticism of the Nineteenth-Century Pirate Poet: Byron, Scott, and Trollope,” published in “Pirates and Mutineer” (2010)
• Author, “The Haunted Space of the Mind: The Revival of the Gothic Romance in the Twenty-First Century,” published in “Empowerment Versus Oppression: Twenty-First-Century Views of Popular Romance Novels” (2007)
• Author, “Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Pornography and Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth-Century England,” published in “Decadence in English Literature” (2006)
• Annotator, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (2009)
• Editor, Scholarly Edition of “Glenarvon”(2007)
• Author, Introduction to “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” (2007)
• Author, Introduction to “Glenarvon” (2007)
• Annotator, “Villette” (2001)
• Annotator, “Middlemarch” (2001)
• Annotator, “Great Expectations” (2000)
• Annotator, “Sense and Sensibility” (2000)
• Annotator, “The Voyage Out” (2000)
• Author, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics and the Materiality of Death in Wuthering Heights and In Memoriam,” published in Victorian Literature and Culture (forthcoming)
• Author, “The Secret Rooms of My Secret Life,” published in English Studies in Canada (2007)
• Author, “Love as Homesickness: Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative,” published in The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
• Author, “The Erotics of Ontology: Failed Presence in Heidegger and the Mass-Market Romance,” published in Comparative Literature and Culture (2003)
• Author, “Kafka’s Itinerary: Toward a Writing of Failure,” published in The George Washington Review (2000)

Honors/Awards

• Recipient, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2010-2011)
• Recipient, Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Dissertation Fellowship (2003-2004)