Harold Love

Literary historian Harold Love, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will speak on Print and Voice at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 23.

The talk — part of The Writing Program Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Hilltop Campus. A book-signing and reception will follow and copies of Love’s books will be available for purchase. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Love, a prominent critic of Early Modern literature, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including most recently English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702 (2004), as well as Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (2002); The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1999); The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1997); and The Golden Age of Australian Opera: W.S. Lyster and his Companies 1861-80 (1981).

“Harold Love is simply one of the most gifted literary historians writing today,” says Joseph Loewenstein, Ph.D., professor of English at Washington University. “He has every skill one would seek in a scholar-critic of Early Modern literature—a startlingly wide breadth of interests, an unusual depth of information immediately at his fingertips, theoretical acuity, extraordinary literary sensitivity. Above all, he has a huge talent for discovering interesting, widely implicative problems and what seems to be a passionate diligence about follow-through, accumulating all the information necessary to make a big, juicy, coherent and reliable response to the problems he discovers.

“Rochester and his ‘canon,’ scribal culture in the (imperfectly designated) age of print, the literary smear — knowing how worthy and capacious these are as topics was the first achievement, and plenty of critics would make a name for themselves just by getting our attention to these as topics,” Lowenstein continued. “But to invent these topics and then to probe them with accuracy and wit and responsibility to the historical record and to the imaginative weight of that record, that’s really the work of genius.”

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Love is currently emeritus professor in the Department of English at Monash University’s School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies.