Amelia Dale is Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Nanjing University's Department of English and an Honorary Associate Investigator (AI 2016) with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She researches eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, with specific interests in quixotism, gender and genre, the history of the book, and ecocriticism. Her book, The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain, explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers: readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Current research involves a large collaborative project with Dr Nicola Parsons (The University of Sydney) on Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794), an ecohistoricist study of Jane Austen’s late work, and a study of the re-purposing of eighteenth-century texts within contemporary experimental writing and conceptual art.
Contact
amelia_k_dale@hotmail.com
Academia.edu
Research
Lessons in Feeling: Quixotic Mothering in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing
Publications
Dale, A. “Contemporary Art and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, edited by M. Newbould and J. Lipski. Edinburgh University Press. Forthcoming, contracted.
Dale, A. 'Sanditon without a summer'. Romanticism. Forthcoming, in press.
Dale, A. and N. Parsons. 'Pornographic Celebrity and the Characters of Harris’s List'. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Forthcoming, in press.
Parsons, N. and A. Dale. 'Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794): New Copies and New Evidence Regarding its History'. The Library: Transactions of The Bibliographical Society. Forthcoming, in press.
Dale, A. 'The Quixotic Eighteenth Century'. Literature Compass (2022). First published online 20 April 2022 https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12660
Dale, A. 'Prophetic Collage: Bella Li’s Lost Lake'. Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 4.2 (2020): 70–79.
Dale, A. 'The Quixotic Mother, the Female Author and Mary Charlton’s Rosella'. Studies in the Novel 52.1 (2020): 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2020.0001
Dale, A. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture. Bucknell University Press, 2019.
Dale, A. '"Out of Season": the Narrative Ecology of Persuasion'. In Romantic Climates, edited by Anne Collett and Olivia Murphy, pp. 75–90. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Dale, A. 'Gendering the Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England'. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 46 (2017): 5–19.
Dale, A. ‘“Acting It as She Reads”: Affective Impressions in Polly Honeycombe’. In Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, edited by H. Kerr, D. Lemmings and R. Phiddian, pp. 165‒82. Series 'Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions'. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Dale, A. ‘Dolly’s Inch of Red Sealing Wax: Impressing the Reader in Tristram Shandy’. In Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne, edited by M. New, P. DeVoogd and J. Hawley. pp. 133–152. Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2015.
Encyclopedia Entries
Dale, A. 'Susannah Gunning, Family Pictures (1764)'. In The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660‒1820 ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contracted, forthcoming.
Dale, A. 'Mrs. Showes, Statira: Or, The Mother (1798)'. In The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660‒1820 ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contracted, forthcoming.
Dale, A. 'Mrs. Showes, The Restless Matron. A Legendary Tale (1799)'. In The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660‒1820 ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contracted, forthcoming.
Dale, A. 'George Lipscomb, Castlethorpe Lodge; Or, The Capricious Mother (1816)'. In The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660‒1820 ed. April London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contracted, forthcoming.
Book Review
Dale, A. Review of 'Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore.' Eighteenth-Century Studies 48.2 (2015): 547–49.
Dale, A. Review of 'The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner'. The Scriblerian 51.1 (2018): 73–75.
Presentations
Dale, A. 'Affective Impressions and Eighteenth-Century Print', 'Emotions, Media and History’ symposium, The University of Adelaide, 23 September 2016.
Dale, A. ‘Lessons in Feeling: Quixotic Mothering in Mary Charlton’s Rosella’, British Women’s Writers Conference, Athens, Georgia, USA, 2‒5 June 2016.
Interview
'Five Questions: Amelia Dale on The Printed Reader.' Interview with Matthew Sangster for British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) blog. 28 April, 2020. http://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=3002.
Podcast
Dale, A. Chawton House Library Conversations, on the anxiety of novel reading in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, especially with female readers, 8 July 2017.
Awards
Yale University Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship. "'Our Cyprian Stage': Character, Theatre and Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies." For August, 2019.
Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. 2017.
Chawton House Library Fellowship. For June, 2017.
