Leland Monk

Leland Monk came to the Boston University English department trained in the study of the novel, especially the Victorian and modern British novel. He has taught undergraduate courses in the Brontës, George Eliot, James Joyce, and the Bloomsbury group.  He has taught graduate seminars in narrative theory, the historical novel, and Joyce.  His book Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel examines the novelistic interest in chance phenomena from George Eliot to James Joyce, demonstrating how British novelists’ paradoxical efforts to include chance events in their meaningful plots gave rise to narrative innovations and contributed to modernist aesthetics.  He has also published essays on Jane Austen’s Emma as murder mystery; Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian as Foucauldian prison structure; and the sense of nothingness in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

While at BU, Leland has pursued an interest in gender and sexuality studies, offering a course in gay and lesbian literature (later incorporating film) every three years since the 1990s, so every generation of students has the opportunity to study such material.  He has taught graduate courses in queer theory and published an essay on homosexual panic in Henry James.