Talia Schaffer

Talia Schaffer is a professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY, where she specializes in Cultural Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist/Queer Theory, History of the Novel, and Victorian Literature. Her most recent book is Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction, published by Oxford University Press in February 2016. Romance’s Rival argues that the marriage plot worked through anxieties about the emergence of romantic marriage by putting a ‘familiar’ suitor (a trusted neighbor, cousin, etc) into competition with a ‘romantic’ suitor (a dashing but perhaps untrustworthy stranger). She has also written Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); co-editor with Kathy A. Psomiades of Women and British Aestheticism (1999); editor of Lucas Malet’s 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and editor of Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006). Shaffer has published widely on Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, noncanonical women writers, material culture, popular fiction,aestheticism, and late-Victorian texts.