John Paul Riquelme

Although he started out as a modernist interested in Irish and British fiction and poetry, 1890-1945, long ago Professor Riquelme stumbled backwards and blindfolded into the nineteenth century, to explore literary modernism’s origins. And he staggered forward to Beckett and beyond, to trace modernism’s aftermath. The temporal expansion reflects his passionate engagement with particular authors (including Hardy, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Beckett) and involves his interest in style and in the conceptual implications of literary form. In mid-career, he taught modern intellectual history in an interdisciplinary program. He now teaches and writes mostly about post-Romantic literature, all the genres, especially writing of the long twentieth century (1885-present) on both sides of the Atlantic, but also about the Gothic tradition (Ann Radcliffe to contemporary science fiction). He also teaches humanistic theory and literary criticism, with emphases on modernity, creativity, aesthetic response, narrative, post-colonialism, and anthropological issues. At the moment, Professor Riquelme projects center on Wilde, Eliot, Beckett, and the Gothic, and he is organizing a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on modernist life narratives.