Aristotle and the Fatal Javelin

Margaret Doody, John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature and the first Director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program, is interested in literature of many languages and cultures. Her career is rooted in the study of the eighteenth century; she is the author of many articles on writers including Swift, Sterne and Austen, and of book-length studies of Samuel Richardson and of Frances Burney, as well as The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge UP 1985; reissued 2010). Her interests have broadened in pursuit of the Novel in its many developments as a form, and she is attracted to the function and nature of stories, and to the work done through the ages by fantasy. Margaret Doody is best known internationally for The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers UP, 1996), and is a constant participant in international conferences on the ancient novel. Her most recent book, Tropic of Venice (University of Pennsylvania UP, 2006), takes a city as a text. She has received an NEH fellowship (2007) for a project tracing the roots of the Enlightenment in the Renaissance, dealing with thinkers such as Pico and Paracelsus; her book in progress is an enquiry into when and how we began to think positively of change as a good thing. The working title is “Love Change and Chaos: the Coming of the Enlightenment”.