James Holstun

James Holstun.

James Holstun

James Holstun

Professor
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences

Interests

Class struggle, feminism, colonialism, and world literature

Selected Publications

Books
  • A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford University Press, 1987).
  • Author of Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (Verso Books, 2000). Winner of the 2002 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Edited Volumes
  • Editor of Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolu­tion (Frank Cass, 1992)
Selected Articles
  • “Black Abdiel and the Higher Law: James Monroe Whitfield vs. the Fillmore Faction,” ELH vol. 90, no. 1, Spring 2023. Winner of the 2025 Isocrates Award of the Milton Society of America. . . .
  • “Shoot and Cry: Realism, Modernism, and the Iraq War Fiction of Justin Sirois and Kevin Powers.” Cultural Critique, no. 104, 2020.
  • “‘Mr. Kayerts. He is Dead’: Literary Realism and Conrad's Outpost of Progress.” ELH, vol. 85, no. 1, Spring 2018.
  • “Buffalo Unsteeled: Connie Porter, Leslie Feinberg, and the Persistence of Proletarian Fiction.” The Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL), vol. 63, no. 1, 2017.
  • “‘Nasty, nasty’: Incest, Islamism, and History in Hadji Murat.” Tolstoy Studies, vol. 28, 2016.
  • “Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies.” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, vol. 29, no. 1, Fall 2015.
  • “Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime.” Historical Materialism, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008.
  • “The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 1, Spring 2004.
  • “‘God bless thee, little David!’: John Felton and His Allies,” ELH, vol. 59, no. 3, Autumn 1992.
  • “‘Will you rent our ancient love asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton.” ELH, vol. 54, no. 4, Winter 1987.
  • “Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus.” ELH 50.3, Autumn 1983.

Major Awards and Fellowships

  • 1990-1991: NEH Fellowship
  • 2002: Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for Ehud’s Dagger.

Works in Progress

  • An essay on Alice Childress’s 1958 play Copra.
  • An essay on Alice Childress‘s writings on Black culture and Black, White, and Red solidarity during the Blacklist.
  • A collection of Alice Childress’s unpublished and unrepublished drama, fiction, and criticism.
  • An essay on Simone de Beauvoir, Nawal el Saadawi, and marxist feminism.
  • An essay on Kang Kyŏng-ae and social reproduction.
  • Essays on the realist socialist-feminist fiction of Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh.
  • Essays on the modernist settler-colonial fiction of Israeli novelist S. Yizhar.
  • An essay on the Alabama communist sharecropper Ned Cobb.
  • An essay on Freud, sexual assault, and Milton’s Eve

 

Curriculum Vitae