Dr. Coby Dowdell

Dr. Coby Dowdell
Associate Professor

(on sabbatical)

English, French, and Writing

Phone: +15195180393
Email: cdowdel2@uwo.ca

Education

  • Ph.D., English Literature, University of Toronto
  • M.A., English Literature, University of Western Ontario
  • Hon. B.A., English Literature and History, University of Guelph

Teaching

  • ENG1027F/G: The Storyteller’s Art I
  • ENG1028F/G: The Storyteller’s Art II (Climate Change Fiction)
  • ENG2299F/G: Critical Practice
  • ENG2203F/G: Studies in Narrative Theory
  • ENG3261F/G: The Afterlives of Freud: Psychoanalytical Theory & Literary Analysis in the Twenty-First Century
  • ENG3348F/G: Topics in Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Literature: Affect, Ethics, Action: Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism
  • ENG3349F/G: Topics in Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Ethics of Augustan Satire
  • ENG4060F/G: Studies in Solitude and Isolation
  • ENG4871F/G: (auto)affective (dis)order(s)

Research

narrative theory (print & digital); psychoanalysis and literature; climate change fiction; ecocriticism; eighteenth-Century British and American literature.

Selected Publications

  • [Multiple entries on eighteenth-century hermit novels]. The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. Edited by April London (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).\

  • “So You Want to Be a Hermit?: The Politics of Doing Nothing at All.” King’s Cosmos. Edited by Jonathan Geen, Ian Rae & Renée Soulodre-La France. (King’s University College, 2018). 8-11.

  • “‘The Luxury of Solitude’: Conduct, Domestic Deliberation, and the Eighteenth-Century Female Recluse.” Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness-Limitation-Liberation. Edited by Ina Bergmann and Stephan Hippler (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017). 79-97.

  • “Ascetic Aesthetics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48.1 (fall 2014): 117-124.

  • “The American Hermit and the British Castaway: Voluntary Retreat & Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture.” Early American Literature 46.1 (spring 2011).

  • “‘A Living Law to Himself and Others’: Daniel Defoe, Algernon Sidney, and the Politics of Self-Interest." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.3 (spring 2010): 415-442.

  • “Withdrawing from the Nation: Regionalist Literature as Ascetic Practice in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.” Legacy 21.2 (2004): 210-228.