Richard Stang

As a professor of Victorian studies and 19th-century literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught for more than 35 years, Stang was an integral member of a vital literary circle that included novelists and fiction writers Stanley Elkin and William Gass, poets Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Donald Finkel, and John Morris, and editor and publisher of Perspective Jarvis Thurston.

This “very full discussion” [5] of the purpose of fiction, the form of the novel, and the technical problems faced by novelists, appeared not as a systematic treatise, Stang demonstrates, but in the pages of the English periodical press.

A review by British critic and novelist V. S. Pritchett in The New Statesman found that “Stang makes his point that the period was not a wasteland of criticism, and that the critics were strenuously building the foundations on which Henry James, the supreme theoretician, was able to build.”[6] Before Stang’s book, Pritchett notes, the extent to which Victorian reviewers had formulated a theory of how novels work was largely unknown “because their work is lost in the files of forgotten periodicals.” [7] The novelists focused on by Stang include Bulwer, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Charles Reade, Trollope, George Meredith, and George Eliot.

Key critics involved in the extended “discussion” were William Caldwell Roscoe, Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton, Leslie Stephen, G. H. Lewes, and David Masson among others.

[10] Important articles by Stang include “The Literary Criticism of George Eliot” in PMLA (1957); “The False Dawn: A Study of the Opening of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude" in ELH (1966); and “Little Dorrit: A World in Reverse” in Dickens the Craftsman, edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (1970).

He was a Fulbright Fellow (1978–79), served on the editorial board of Dickens Studies Annual, and was a reader for PMLA and Nineteenth Century Fiction.