The Princeton Rare Book Fair, October 2nd - 4th

 The New England author Henry James moved to London permanently in the late 1870s and in the same period wrote the first critical book on his literary predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was successful but heavily criticized at the time for being a patronizing take on Hawthorne and the US. And yet James's fidelity to Hawthorne only increased over time and was central to the creation of literary masterpieces like his tale "The Beast in the Jungle" and novel The Golden Bowl. This talk considers "imaginative collaboration," a form of literary influence that allows the living writer to, in Stephen Greenblatt's words, "speak with the dead." 

David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and film history. Holding a Ph.D. from Brandeis University, his scholarship heavily integrates psychoanalytic and queer theory to examine the complexities of male identity, desire, and anxiety in both classic literature and popular cinema. 

His extensive literary research spans nineteenth-century American romanticism and authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, exploring themes of antebellum same-sex desire and literary influence in books like Men Beyond Desire, Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature, and All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence. Concurrently, his substantial body of film and cultural criticism investigates Hollywood genre cinema, television, and auteur theory. He has published widely on Alfred Hitchcock—including works such as Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin and Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory—as well as studies on post-millennial masculinity (Ghost Faces), cyborg cinema (Queering the Terminator), and classic queer cinema (Maurice).