John A. Hodgson

John A. Hodgson is the author of four books (see below for list) and numerous essays on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to Faulkner, from puns to cryptography. After graduate work in the Department of English at Yale (Ph.D. 1972) he was a Professor of English Literature at Yale and the University of Georgia for almost twenty years. He is a past fellow of the National Humanities Center (1981-82). He completed his academic career by serving as the Dean of Forbes College at Princeton University for twenty years (1994-2014).

In retirement, he began to focus increasingly on nineteenth-century American cultural and literary history. Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity (2018), more than twenty years in the making, was the first result of that new turn. He is now engaged in a study—working title, “Schooling: Bootstrapping, Affirmative Action, and a Family’s Sustained Pursuit of Education”—of the tangled histories that eventually enabled a young Black man from rural Arkansas, son of a former slave, to matriculate and thrive at an Ivy League school a hundred years ago. The story goes back to a South Carolina cotton plantation in the 1820s and continues into the present.

Books:

Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018; new paperback edition, 2024.

Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. and intro. John A. Hodgson. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Wordsworth's Philosophical Poetry, 1797 1814. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

Articles published in books:

“Theatricals in Taverns in the Early Nineteenth Century: From John Rannie to Richard Potter and Beyond.” Entertainments at Taverns and Long Rooms in New England, 1700-1900, ed. Peter Benes. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2019. 10-32. (2022.)

“Arthur Conan Doyle.” The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. London: Blackwell, 2010. 390-402.

"The Recoil of 'The Speckled Band': Detective Story and Detective Discourse." Poetics Today 13 (1992): 309-24. Reprinted in Sherlock Holmes and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. John A. Hodgson. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994. 335-52.

"Trembling into Thought: Approaching Coleridge through 'The Eolian Harp.'" Approaches to Teaching Coleridge's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Richard Matlak. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991. 69-75.

"The Younger Romantics: Teaching Shelley with Byron and Keats." Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Poetry. Ed. Spencer Hall. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. 132-36.

"Sympathy and Imagination: Wordsworth and English Romantic Poetry." Approaches to Teaching Wordsworth's Poetry. Ed. Spencer Hall. New York: Modern Language Asso¬ciation of America, 1986. 130-36.

"Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge's Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol." Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Harvard English Studies, 9. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 273-92.