User:Kevin Joel Berland

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022. Kevin Joel Berland has a B.A. (First Class Honours) and M.A. in English from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and a Ph.D. in English from McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. He is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State Shenango. His research interests include English, Irish, and North American literature and culture in the long 18th century, the early-modern history of philosophy and classical culture, physiognomy, poetry, and early-modern versions of Socrates. His current research projects include preparing a new edition of the Dividing Line histories of 18th-century Virginia planter William Byrd II of Westover.

Since 1990, KJB has been editor, factotum, dogsbody, and netwallah of C18-L, the international online forum for eighteenth-century studies across the disciplines, and compiler of the online bibliography Selected Readings. KJB also serves on the editorial board of Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle, and on the editorial board of Blackwell's Literature Compass.

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Publications - Books:

Berland, Kevin; Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth W. Lockridge, eds. The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 2001.

Graham, Kenneth, & Kevin Berland, eds. Millennial Beckford. New York: AMS Press, 2005.

Publications - Articles and Chapters:

“Bribing Aristophanes: The Uses of History and the Attack on the Theater in England,” in Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500-1700, Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey, ed. Greg Clingham (Bucknell University Press, 2006).

“Formalized Curiosity in the Electronic Age and the Uses of On-Line Text Bases.” The Age of Johnson, 17 (2006): 391-414 (Review Essay).

“Inborn Character and Free Will in the History of Physiognomy,” in Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler, eds., Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 25-38. Reprint, “Reading Character in the Face: Lavater, Socrates, and Physiognomy,” in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, 142 (2004), ed. Russel Whitaker (Thomson-Gale).

“Chesterfield Demands the Muse: Dublin Print Culture, Poetry and the ‘Irish’ Voice, 1745-6.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris and dá chultúr, 17 (2002): 121-145.

“The Paradise Garden and the Imaginary East: Alterity and Reflexivity in British Orientalist Romances.” The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 2 (2002): 137-59.

“William Byrd’s Sexual Lexicography.”  Eighteenth-Century Life, 23, n.s. 1 (February, 1999): 1-11.

“William Byrd’s Scriblerian Stories.” Scriblerian, 31, 2/32, 1 (Spring & Autumn 1999): 231-34 [with Jan K. Gilliam and Kenneth W. Lockridge].

“‘The Air of a Porter”: Lichtenberg and Lavater Test Physiognomy by Looking at Dr. Johnson,” The Age of Johnson, 10 (1999): 219-230.

“‘The Marks of Character’: Physiology and Physiognomy in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel.” Philological Quarterly, 76, 3 (Summer 1997): 193-218.

“The Bangorian Controversy,” “Edmund Burke (1729-1797),” and “William Law (1686-1761),” in Britain in the Hanoverian Age 1714: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gerald Newman et al. (New York: Garland, 1977), pp. 41-2, 82-4, 398-99.

“Frances Moore Brooke,” and “Frances Chamberlaine Sheridan,” two chapters of annotated bibliography, in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Women Novelists: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Doreen Alvarez Saar and Mary Anne Schofield (New York: G.K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1996, pp. 18-43.

“Reading character in the face: Lavater, Socrates, and physiognomy.” Word and Image, 9, 3 (July-September 1993): 252-69.

“Didactic, Catechetical, or Obstetricious: Socrates and 18th-Century Dialogue,” in Compendious Conversations: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dialogue, ed. Kevin L. Cope (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 93-104.

“Dialogue into drama: Socrates in 18th-century verse dramas.” Themes in Drama (Cambridge University Press), 12 (1990): 127-41. “Frances Brooke and David Garrick.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990): 217-30.

“A Tax on Old Maids and Bachelors: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid,” in Eighteenth Century Women and Literature, ed. Frederick Keener and Susan Lorsch (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 29-36.

“The True Epicurean Philosopher: Some Influences on Frances Brooke’s History of Emily Montague.” Dalhousie Review, 66 (1986): 286-300.

“Bringing Philosophy Down from the Heavens: Socrates and the New Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986): 299-308.

“Scott’s Dryden: The Whig Interpretation of Literary History.” Restoration, 9, 1 (1985): 2-8.

“The Way of Caution: Elenchus in Bacon’s Essays.” Renaissance and Reformation-Renaissance et reforme, N.S. 9, 1 (1985): 44-57.

“Satire and the via media: Anglican Dialogue in Joseph Andrews,” in Satire in the 18th Century, ed. John Browning (New York: Garland, 1983), pp. 44-57.

“Johnson’s Life-Writing and the Life of Dryden,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 23 (1982): 197-218.

Publications - Forthcoming:

“Diaries,” a chapter in the Oxford Handbook to Early American Literature, ed. Kevin J. Hayes, forthcoming in 2007.

“John Gilbert Cooper’s Life of Socrates,” forthcoming in a special issue of Annals of Scholarship on classical texts in the eighteenth century, edited by Martha K. Zebrowski.