Gretchen Bartels Ray, PhD

ENG 113, ENG 123, ENG 233, ENG 313, ENG 343, ENG 353, ENG 360, ENG 401/501, ENG 499

Nineteenth-century British literature, Creative Writing (poetry and fiction), the Oxford Inklings, History of the novel, Children's literature, Composition

Six years teaching experience in composition and literature at University of California, Riverside

DISSERTATION:

In my dissertation project, I argue that editors in the nineteenth-century were pivotal in shaping literary culture and defining popular markets as I trace the trajectory of editing in the nineteenth century. My primary focus is the impact of celebrity author-editors in the mid-nineteenth century, the power they held, the professionalization and aestheticization of the role over the course of the nineteenth century, and how these author-editors shaped literary culture. By engaging author-editors’ fiction, periodicals, and letters, I reconstruct their editorial roles, the power accessible to and accessed by them in this role, how they represented editing in their fiction, and the influence beyond authorship editing gave them in the nineteenth-century literary scene. Overall, I claim that periodical editing gave authors more power in the literary marketplace and that periodical editing itself serves a type of authorial function that can complicate current theories of how authorship was viewed in the nineteenth century. By considering editing as a complex type of authorship that raises questions of collective authorship, I complicate the narrative of the rise of the Author, as described by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, which portrays the nineteenth century as a time when the cult of the Author as an individual genius and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning developed.

PUBLICATIONS:


Drafted “Chapter 8: Justifying an Evaluation.” St. Martin's Guide to Writing
Instructor's Resource Manual. 9th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 205-238. Print.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:

“Conducted By”: Charles Dickens and Literary Magazine Author-Editors in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
109th PAMLA Annual Conference
Scripps College, Claremont
November 5-6, 2011

Prisoner or Slave: Metaphors for Opium and Hashish Eaters during the Nineteen Century in the Works of Charles Baudelaire and Thomas De Quincey
126th MLA Annual Convention
Los Angeles Convention Center
January 6 – 9, 2011

The Multiple Narrators of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White
(Dis)junctions: States of Crisis
University of California, Riverside
April 9 and 10, 2010

Bella and Rokesmith’s Dark Fairy Tale in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
Dickens Universe Conference
University of California, Los Angeles
February 13 – 15, 2010

Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood: Reclaiming the Image through Visual Rhetoric
PAMLA Conference
San Francisco State University
November 6 and 7, 2009

Narnia Chronicled: C. S. Lewis’s Figuration of History and Myth in the Narnia Books (Dis)junctions: Brave New Worlds
University of California, Riverside
2009

“This Shakespeare of Ours”: Victorian Shakespeare, Empire, and the Question of Englishness
British Scholar Annual Conference
University of Texas at Austin
February 20 and 21, 2009

Redefining WAC/Writing Center Connections
PAMLA Conference
Pomona College
November 7 and 8, 2008

Of Men and Mice: C. S. Lewis on Male-Female Interactions
(Dis)junctions: Where the Streets are Re-named
University of California, Riverside
April 11 and 12, 2008

“Will you let me lend you all I have? Will you let me give it you?”: Unacceptable Gifts and the Purging of Excess in the Marriage Market of Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
Surplus/Excess
University of California, Riverside.
April 4 and 5, 2008

The Foundry Community Church

Volunteer And Research Experience:

Rebirth Homes Newsletter

Rebirth Homes Mentor

Sexual Assault Advocate with Riverside Area Rape Crisis Center 2017-2018

Reader at the Huntington Library, May 2011-2020

Rare Books and Manuscripts

(dis)Junctions Conference
Conference Co-chair, (dis)junctions 09
Panel Committee Chair, (dis)junctions 2012
Panel Committee, (dis)junctions 07 and (dis)junctions 08

Graduate Students of English Association, Secretary, June 2007-February 2009