James Butler, Ph.D.

My particular interests are in nineteenth-century British literature, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge. But my teaching interests also range more widely: several introductory courses; the Greeks to the present in the interdisciplinary Freshman Honors Program; Advanced Composition; Contemporary Poetry; British Literature from 1900 to the Present; Philadelphia Literature and Culture; an occasional special topics course such as Frankenstein's Children. Lately, I've been working on Charles Willson Peale, the Wister Family, and the history of La Salle’s campus; as appropriate, I include these topics in my courses. I also serve as director of the university's Undergraduate Student Research Program and as curator of the Connelly Library's Wister Family Special Collection.

OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY:
I served as one of the supervisory editors of the Cornell Wordsworth Series (1975-2007), now complete in twenty-one volumes. Book-length publications include editions for Cornell University Press of William Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage and the Pedlar (1979, reprinted 1989), of his Lyrical Ballads (1992, reprinted 1996), and of his Excursion (2007, second-place winner of the Modern Language Association prize for a distinguished scholarly edition). My edition of Owen Wister's Romney was published by Penn State Press in 2001, and in 2008 the La Salle University Art Museum published my Charles Willson Peale’s “Belfield”: A History of a National Historic Landmark. I also co-edited Eugene Chesnick’s posthumously-published novel Farm Persevere (2010). Published articles and reviews include work on James Beattie, Daniel Berrigan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dorothy Day, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Logan Fisher, Edward Hicks, Rolf Hochhuth, Samuel Johnson, Charles Willson Peale, Percy Bysshe Shelley, H.G. Wells, E. B. White, T.H. White, William Wilberforce, Frances Anne Wister, Owen Wister, Sarah Butler Wister, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, nineteenth-century travel literature, and British Romantic and Victorian painting. Work in progress includes an edition of the collected poetry of Owen Wister.