Robert Dale Parker
Professor of English
Robert Dale Parker is the Frank Hodgins Professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He writes and teaches about American literature, modern literature, and critical theory, especially fiction and poetry.
Research
Robert Dale Parker (he, him, his) writes about American literature and critical theory, especially poetry and fiction. His latest book, The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression, is due out in March 2025 from Oxford University Press. Parker’s scholarship and teaching pursue interests in literary form and aesthetics, history, gender, the sociopolitical roles of literature, and a pleasure in thinking through critical theory.
Parker has published two books and many articles on the fiction of William Faulkner, including Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination and “Absalom, Absalom!”: The Questioning of Fictions, as well as The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and The Invention of Native American Literature, a critical and theoretical study of the emergence of American Indian literature and American Indian literary studies across the twentieth century. He has also undertaken a large-scale recovery of early Native American poetry, leading to a series of articles and two books: Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 and The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, which includes an edition of the works of the first-known Native American literary writer along with a biography and cultural history. Committed to merging scholarship with readability and theory with interpretation, he has also published How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (now in its fourth edition) and Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies.
Recognized by campus awards for both undergraduate and graduate teaching, Parker has taught courses in the various periods of American literature, especially after 1900, as well as critical theory surveys and courses in Modernist literature, Native American literature, Faulkner, and other topics.
Publications
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Books
The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression. Oxford University Press, forthcoming March 2025.
How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 4th edition. Oxford University Press, 2020.
How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Chinese translation. Trans. Yang Xiaoqiang. Wuhan University Press, 2018.
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Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies. Oxford University Press, 2012. Seventy selections with introduction and headnotes.
How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 2nd edition. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Paperback edition, 2012. Based on archival research, this book gathers a large body of poetry previously unknown to critics and historians, with extensive annotation and an extended introduction.
How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Oxford University Press, 2008.
The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Paperback edition, 2008. Based on archival research uncovering the first-known American Indian literary writer (1800-1842), this book includes a heavily annotated edition and a cultural and literary history and biography.
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The Invention of Native American Literature. Cornell University Press, 2003. Paperback edition, 2004.
“Absalom, Absalom!”: The Questioning of Fictions. Twayne, 1991.
The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination. University of Illinois Press, 1985.
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Selected Articles
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“The Displacement of Place in ‘American History’ and American History: Poems and Places from the Middle Passage and the Trail of Tears to the Birmingham Bombing.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, forthcoming 2024.
“Recentering ‘Indian Blood’ and the Reversion to Type in ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair.’” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 21 (2023) (expected to appear in April or May of 2024).
“Modernist Literary Studies and the Aesthetics of American Indian Literatures.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, 2021.
“The Multiplicity of Early American Indian Poetry.” Cambridge History of Native American Literature. Ed. Melanie Benson Taylor. Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 131-148.
“How to Make a Queer: The Erotics of Begging; or, Down and Out in the Great Depression.” American Literature, vol. 91, no. 1, 2019, pp. 91-119.
“A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 235-257.
“Braided Relations: Toward a History of Nineteenth-Century American Indian Women’s Poetry.” A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Ed. Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 313-328.
“American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. Oxford University Press, 2012. 71-95.
“Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.” Oxford Bibliographies Online. Oxford University Press. 2012.
“American Indian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.” Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Kerry Larson. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 36-53.
“Contemporary Anticolonialist Reading and the Collaborative Writing of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.” Before Yesterday: The Long History of Native American Writing. Ed. Simone Pellerin. Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Collection “Lettres d’Amérique(s),” 2009. 47-52.
“Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston.” American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2008.
“The Hum of Routine: Issues for the Study of Early American Indian Print Culture, a Response to Phillip H. Round.” American Literary History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2007, pp. 290-96.
“Red Slippers and Cottonmouth Moccasins: White Anxieties in Faulkner’s Indian Stories.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 18, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 81-99.
“Perloff’s Universe, or The Demagoguery of Naturalized Aesthetic Taste.” symploke, vol. 9, no. 1-2, 2002, pp. 181-82. Because of an editorial error the full text of this article did not appear in print, but it is available online.
“‘Where you want to go now’: Recharting the Scene Shifts in the First Section of The Sound and the Fury.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 1999, pp. 3-20.
“Who Shot the Sheriff: Storytelling, Indian Identity, and the Marketplace of Masculinity in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, 1997, pp. 898-932.
“Text, Lines, and Videotape: The Ideology of Genre and the Transcription of Traditional Native American Oral Narrative as Poetry.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 53, no. 3, 1997, pp. 141-69. [Revised version appears in The Invention of Native American Literature.]
“Sanctuary and Bad Taste.” Etudes Faulknériennes I, Sanctuary. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1996, pp. 63-69.
“Sex and Gender, Feminine and Masculine: Faulkner and the Polymorphous Exchange of Cultural Binaries.” Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994. Ed. Ann J. Abadie and Donald M. Kartiganer. University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 73-96.
“The Other Coldfields: Gender, Commerce, and the Exchange of Bodies in Absalom, Absalom!” Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sutpen Family. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. G. K. Hall, 1996. 239-48.
“‘Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces’: Teaching the First Section of The Sound and the Fury.” Approaches to Teaching Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” Ed. Stephen Hahn and Arthur F. Kinney. Modern Language Association, 1996. 27-37.
“To Be There, No Authority to Anything: Ontological Desire and Cultural and Poetic Authority in the Poetry of Ray A. Young Bear.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 50, no. 4, 1994, pp. 89-115. [Revised version appears in The Invention of Native American Literature.]
“Material Choices: American Fictions, the Classroom, and the Post-Canon.” American Literary History, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 89-110. [Revised version appears in The Invention of Native American Literature.]
“Poetry and Pedagogy: A Memory of Michael Harper Teaching.” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, vol. 13, no. 4, 1990, pp. 810-12.
“The Chronology and Genealogy of Absalom, Absalom!: The Authority of Fiction and the Fiction of Authority.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 14, no. 2, 1986, pp. 191-98.
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