About

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture; Law and Literature; Literature and Ethics; Gender Studies; Transatlantic Studies; History of the Novel

Education

Ph.D., English Literature, Yale University

M.A., American Studies, Yale University

J.D., University of Pennsylvania Law School

A.B., Princeton University

Publications

Book        

Public Vows:  Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press, June 2019; winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies).

Articles and Book Chapters

“Marriage Law,” forthcoming in Daniel Defoe in Context, ed. George Justice and Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

‘A Kind of Insanity in My Spirits’: Frankenstein, Childhood, and Criminal Intent,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 1 (Fall 2022): 53-74.

Corporate Persons, Collective Responsibility, and the Literary Imagination,” Critical Analysis of Law: An Interdisciplinary and International Law Review 9, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 46-57.

“‘The fidelity of promising’: Egoism and Obligation in Austen,” Review of English Studies 73, no. 309 (April 2022): 344-60.

“Debating Persuasion,” in Approaches to Teaching Austen’s “Persuasion,”  ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire (MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, 2021), 175-82.

Carrying On Like a Madman:  Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,Nineteenth-Century Literature 70, no. 3 (December 2015): 363-97.

Freedom and Fetters:  Nuptial Law in Burney’s The Wanderer,” in Impassioned Jurisprudence:  Law, Literature, and Emotion, 1760-1848, ed. Nancy E. Johnson (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 66-88.

Clandestine Schemes:  Burney’s Cecilia and the Marriage Act,” Eighteenth Century:  Theory and Interpretation 54, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 25-51.

Binding the Will:  George Eliot and the Practice of Promising,” ELH 75, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 565-602.

“‘A Strange Opposition’:  The Portrait of a Lady and the Divorce Debates,” Henry James Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 156-74.

Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 2 (Jan. 2005): 157-82.

Wicked Women and Veiled Ladies:  Gendered Narratives of the McFarland-Richardson Tragedy,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 255-303.

Short Essay

“Debate,” The Pocket Instructor:  Literature:  101 Exercises for the College Classroom, ed. Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason (Princeton UP, 2015), 21-23.

Reviews and Review Essays

Review of Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form by Claire Jarvis. Victorian Studies 60, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 108-10.

Review of Common Precedents:  The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction by Ayelet Ben-Yishai.  Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (Jan. 2016): 237-39.

Review of Reading for the Law:  British Literary History and Gender Advocacy by Christine L. Krueger, and Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 by Cathrine O. Frank.  Victorian Studies 55, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 567-70.

Review of Riding the Black Ram:  Law, Literature, and Gender by Susan Sage Heinzelman.  Law, Culture and the Humanities 8, no. 1 (February 2012): 173-76.  

Review of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and  Theology  by Jan-Melissa Schramm.  Victorian Studies 44, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 728-30.

Review of Criminal Conversations:  Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery by Laura Korobkin.  American Journal of Legal History 45, no. 4 (October 2001): 517-18.

“Common Sinners and Moral Monsters:  The Killer in American Culture.”  Review of   Murder Most Foul:  The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination by Karen  Halttunen.  Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 11, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 517-28.                                                

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    Melissa J. Ganz

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