Jane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American

literary scholar Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. T ...

who has worked on

canon Canon or Canons may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Canon (fiction), the conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base * Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture ** Western ca ...

formation,

feminist literary criticism Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to an ...

, and

reader response criticism Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or " audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content an ...

. She has also coined and developed the notion of

cultural work Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tylor ...

literary studies Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. T ...

and contributed to the new historicist form of literary criticism that emerged in the 1980s. She earned her PhD at

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

in 1966 and subsequently taught at

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then calle ...

, Duke University, and the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the University of Illinois ...

. She is married to cultural critic

Stanley Fish Stanley Eugene Fish (born April 19, 1938) is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo Sc ...

Cultural work

Tompkins developed her idea of texts doing cultural work in her 1985 book ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. She argues that texts (e.g. novels) do "a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation." To her, "plots and characters" provide "society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions. It is the notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them, that I wish to substitute finally for the critical perspective that sees them as attempts to achieve a timeless, universal ideal of truth and formal coherence."Jane Tompkins. ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 200

Books

* ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. * ''West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. * ''A Life In School: What The Teacher Learned''. New York: Perseus Books, 1996. * ''Reading Through The Night''. University of Virginia Press, 2018.

References

1940 births American academics of English literature American literary critics Women literary critics Literary critics of English Living people American women critics {{US-academic-stub