Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his pioneering work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Academic career
Clayton attended Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas and The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before going on to receive his B.A. from Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1979. He taught English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving to Vanderbilt University in 1988. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. As Chair of the English department at Vanderbilt from 2003 to 2010, he helped recruit renowned professors to the university. His first book , published by Cambridge University Press in 1987, compared Victorian realist fiction with romantic poetry. It proposed a theory of Romantic visionary moments in nineteenth-century English fiction as lyric disruptions of the narrative line. His book on multiculturalism in American fiction and theory, , published by Oxford University Press in 1993, was selected by Choice as An Outstanding Academic Book for 1995. Surveying American fiction and literary theory from the 1970s-1990s, Clayton argued for the political and social power of narratives. His best known book, , was published by Oxford University Press in 2003. It won the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship in 2004. Moving from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Clayton shows how Victorian literature and technology reverberates in contemporary American culture. Clayton was an early adopter of digital approaches to pedagogy, teaching classes on hypertext and computer games beginning in 1996. In 2013, he launched a highly successful MOOC on the Coursera platform titled “Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative,” which has reached over 85,000 students from more than 120 countries around the world. More recently, his classes have focused on literature, genetics, and science policy.
Publications
Books
2003, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture
1993, The Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory
1987, Romantic Vision and the Novel
Edited collections
2007, Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture. Co-edited with Priscilla Wald
2002, Time and the Literary. Co-edited with Marianne Hirsch and Karen Newman
1991, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Co-edited with Eric Rothstein
1988, Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory. Co-edited with Betsy Draine
Selected Articles
2016, “The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle,” Modernism/Modernity
2013, “The Ridicule of Time: Science Fiction, Bioethics, and the Posthuman,” American Literary History
2013, “Genome Time: Post-Darwinism, Then and Now,” Critical Quarterly
2012, “Touching the Telectroscope: Haptic Communications,” Journal of Victorian Culture
2012, “The Dickens Tape: Affect and Sound Reproduction in The Chimes,” Essays and Studies
2012, “The Future of Victorian Literature,” Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
2009, “Literature and Science Policy: A New Project for the Humanities,” PMLA
2007, “Victorian Chimeras, or, What Literature Can Contribute to Genetics Policy Today,” New Literary History
2003, “Frankenstein's Futurity,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley
2002, “Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature,” American Literature
2002, “Genome Time,” Time and the Literary
2000, “Hacking the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century
1997, “The Voice in the Machine: Hazlitt, Hardy, James,” Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production
1996, “Concealed Circuits: Frankenstein's Monster, the Medusa, and the Cyborg,” Raritan
1995, “Londublin: Dickens's London in Joyce's Dublin,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction
1995, “Is Pip Postmodern? or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations”
1993, “A Portrait of the Romantic Poet as a Young Modernist: Literary History as Textual Unconscious,” Joyce: The Return of the Repressed
1991, “Dickens and the Genealogy of Postmodernism,” Nineteenth Century Literature
1991, “The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans, Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrel,” Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History
1991, “Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality”, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History
“The Narrative Turn in Recent Minority Fiction,” American Literary History
1989, “Narrative and Theories of Desire,” Critical Inquiry
1979, “Visionary Power and Narrative Form: Wordsworth and Adam Bede,” ELH
