Professor Stavreva publishes British Literature series

Cornell College Professor of English Katy Stavreva has edited two series of ebooks for use in introductory college courses to introduce the field of British Literature. The series are published online by Gale Researcher (Cengage Learning), a digital platform that provides media-rich scholarly introductions to core topics in disciplines ranging from British and American Literature to Economics and Philosophy. Stavreva is playing a key role in developing this new research platform with Gale, a company that has partnered with libraries around the world. The platform is designed to help students develop critical thinking and research skills, to inspire intellectual curiosity, and to strengthen librarian and faculty collaboration.  

The first series edited by Stavreva, “Major Authors and Movements in British Literature,” charts the multilingual and multicultural strands in the history of British literature—from its oral origins in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elegiac and heroic poetry to the contemplative, politically engaged, multivoiced, and multimedia literature of the twenty-first century.

Her second series, “Major Genres, Forms, and Media in British Literature,” begins with a consideration of the openness of British literature in terms of languages, regional, national, and racial identity. It ends by foregrounding the openness and malleability of approaches to literary research and critical writing. The core of this series is the discussion, illustrated by analyses of representative works, of major literary genres and forms: the novel, the short story, the essay, British poetries including the sonnet and the epic, and British drama from medieval mysteries to modern farce.

Works by two Cornell faculty members appear in the series on “Major Genres, Forms, and Media in British Literature.”: Professor of English Michelle Mouton’s essay “The Serialized Novel: Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell” is published in the monograph on “Literary and Book Productions.” “The Literary Research Process,” an essay by Consulting Librarian for Arts & Humanities Jen Rouse, appears in “The Discipline, Ethics, and Art of Writing about Literature.”

As editor, Stavreva mapped the content for the two series of 10 volumes each, with nine to 10 articles per volume, worked with the authors to ensure the scholarly quality of the articles, and wrote overview essays for six of the series’ volumes.