Faculty Bio

Mark A. Allison

Associate Professor of English

Education

B.A., Kenyon College
M.A., University of Chicago
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

About

Mark Allison specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century Britain.  His research interests include utopian literature and theory; socialism, working-class political culture, and Marxism; and the British novel.  His current book project, Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-Politics, and Literature, 1817–1917, explores the intersections of socialism and literature in the long nineteenth century, with special emphasis on their shared antipathy to institutional politics.

Publications/Presentations

• “Prematurity, Periodicity, and Agency in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’” Nineteenth-Century Prose 34 (2007): 143–62.
• “Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch,” ELH 78 (2011): 715–39.
• “The Importance of Ernest: Poetic Vanguardism and Popular Revolution in Capel Lofft’s Forgotten Epic,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67 (2012): 285–311. 
• “The Mustard Seed of British Socialism: Carlyle, Robert Owen, and ‘Infallible Influence.’”  In Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence, ed. Paule E. Kerry et al.  Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2018.  279-93.
• “Building a Bridge to Nowhere: Morris, the Education of Desire, and the Party of Utopia,” Utopian Studies 29.1 (2018): 44-66.