Faculty

Merritt Moseley

Professor, Department Chair

239 Karpen Hall, CPO#2130 828.251.6583 moseley@unca.edu http://www.unca.edu/~moseley

I enjoy teaching and students and I like to teach a lot of different things; I sometimes teach the department’s major courses in The American Literary Tradition, Romantic to Modern, The Art of the Novel, Masterpieces of Drama, and Modern Literature, as well as special topics from time to time. I regularly teach in the Humanities program, usually in 124.

My scholarship in recent years has been focused on contemporary British novelists; I’ve published books on David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Julian Barnes and Michael Frayn, and am the editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography volumes on British Novelists Since 1960 (four volumes, the most recent appearing in 2003) and Booker Prize Novels, 1969-2005.

My most recent book was an edited anthology, The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays, published in 2007 by Chester Academic Press (England). I've contributed chapters to various volumes in the Bloom's Themes series (edited by Blake Hobby), for example essays on "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Catch-22, and Wide Sargasso Sea. I review books regularly, too, and this along with my own scholarship keeps me reading a great deal of recent fiction which, fortunately, is one of the things I most love to do. In June 2008 I was one of the keynote speakers at a conference called Julian Barnes and the European Tradition at Liverpool Hope University. My current projects in progress include a book called The Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism of Pat Barker (Palgrave Macmillan) and Understanding Jonathan Coe (University of South Carolina Press). 

Education

 

Recent Publications

 The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays [Editor] (Chester, UK: Chester Academic Press, 2007

Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 326): Booker Prize Novels, 1969-2005 (Editor). Gale, 2006. (ADD): author of chapters on Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist; J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K; Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils; Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang; and John Banville, The Sea.

Understanding Michael Frayn (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2006).

Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 326): Booker Prize Novels, 1969-2005 (Editor). Gale, 2006.

“Amis, Father and Son,” in Brian W. Shaffer, Ed., A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 302-13.

“Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot,” in Brian W. Shaffer, Ed., A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 481-92.

(co-edited, with Brian Hook and Katherine Peters) The Asheville Reader: The Ancient World. Acton, MA: Copley, 2004.

Recent Teaching