“This is the sublime and refined Point of Felicity, called, The Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves.”

~A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift

In 1997, I was asked by my department chair at Marquette University to teach a course on Jane Austen. I had read all of her novels, some of them as a child, but had taught only one of them, Sense and Sensibility, as part of an undergraduate survey on British literature from 1800 to the present. I was not an expert nor had I done any appreciable research on Austen or her works, so I assumed this would be a one-term assignment. I was wrong….

Read full post at Cambridge Core Blog

Albert J. Rivero, Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University, has published widely on the long eighteenth century. He received his A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of London and has held fellowships from the ACLS, American Philosophical Society, Clark Library, Newberry Library, and NEH. He has edited the Norton Critical Editions of Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition for Cambridge University Press. In 2023, he was recognized with the Robert and Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.