Debra Fried

Overview

Debra Fried teaches a wide range of English and American literature, with a focus on poetry. Courses include surveys of English literature (from Beowulf to Hardy); graduate and undergraduate seminars in poetic meter and rhythm; and special topics such as the language of lyric poetry; American Transcendentalism; and filmic adaptations of Henry James. Professor Fried’s work appears in On Puns; Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry; and other collections. An abiding interest in ancient Greek and Latin poetry, nineteenth-century neoclassicism, and the history of poetic explication and commentary inform her current project: a study of what counts as a “detail” in poems and the shifting status of particularity as a poetic value.

Research Focus

• Nineteenth-century American poetry and poetics; Dickinson, Thoreau
• History and theory of the lyric in English; lyric genres
• Prosody, poetic form, and historical poetics
• Transatlantic Romanticisms and modern American poetry
• Linguistic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic approaches
• Poetry and the visual arts; poetry and everyday aesthetics
• Classic American film and film theory