Maeve Adams

Maeve Adams

I work on nineteenth-century British literature and the histories of war, politics and science. I also teach in these areas, in addition to teaching courses in detective literature, children's literature and critical theory. My current research projects investigate the development of literary and non-literary genres in the nineteenth-century in relation to ongoing international conflicts (defensive and offensive) and the development of modern social sciences and humanities that studied those conflicts. 

This project addresses the concept of force in Romantic and Victorian literature, science and politics. I examine literary and non-literary forms of writing—from novels and lyric poetry to new forms of war journalism and statistical writing—that reconceived ‘rhetorical force’ in reaction to the era’s ongoing military conflicts at home and abroad. Experimenting with new persuasive practices, these genres remade the classical “arts of persuasion” for a modern era of war, reform and empire.