Kari Lokke

A photo of Professor Lokke looking straight on to the viewer, smiling

Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature

Education and Degree(s)

  • Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis
  • M.A., Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis
  • B.A., French and Comparative Literature, Indiana University

Research Interest(s)

  • British and European Romanticism
  • Women Writers
  • The Gothic
  • Aesthetics, the Sublime and Grotesque
  • Theory of Myth
  • Discourses of Enthusiasm and Fanaticism

Profile

Professor Kari Lokke's research and teaching interests are strongly interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, feminist theory, and the literature of England, France and Germany. Earlier publications explored the socio-political and cultural significance of the aesthetics of sublimity and its double, the grotesque. She has also published several articles on British women poets of the Romantic era. The author of Gérard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary (1987) and co-editor with Adriana Craciun of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (2001), she recently completed Tracing Women's Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence (2004) which explores landscapes of spiritual and aesthetic transcendence in the novels of Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand. Teaching interests include English and European Romanticisms, the Gothic, women writers, theory of myth, philosophy of history, and aesthetics.

Selected Publications

  • Gérard de Nerval: The Poet as Social Visionary (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1987)
  • "Dark Forgetfulness" and "The Intercession of Saint Monica": Charlotte Smith and Literary History," Women's Studies 27 (1998): 259-280.
  • Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, co-ed. with Adriana Craciun (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001)
  • "Children of Liberty": Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand," PMLA, May 2003, Vol. 118.3, 502-20.
  • Tracing Women's Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (London: Routledge, 2005)
    Winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize awarded by the International Conference on Romanticism
  • “Gender and Sexuality,” The Handbook to Romanticism Studies, ed. Julia Wright and Joel Faflak (London: Blackwell, 2012): 307-324.