Deborah Elise White is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Emory University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University
where she wrote a dissertation on the language of allegory in the British poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Her book, Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History was
published by Stanford University Press in 2000; it draws on the work of William
Collins and William Hazlitt as well as Percy Shelley to show the continuing importance of
romantic concepts of imagination for thinking and theorizing the historicity of literature.
Professor White has also published essays on Freud, Coleridge, and Hugo.
She is currently developing two projects: a study of the rhetoric and poetics of dates in
the nineteenth-century discourse of revolution and a study of European romanticism in
the genealogy of totalitarianism.

Selected Publications:

• Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000
  

• Irony and Clerisy. Editor and author of critical introduction for a special volume in the electronic series Romantic Praxis, 1999 (part of the Romantic Circles website published by the University of Maryland)
  

• “Victor Hugo’s Romantic Exile.” European Romantic Review (April 2005)
  

• “Imagination’s Date: A Postscript to the Biographia Literaria.” European Romantic Review (December 2003)
  

• “The Seashore’s Path: Shelley and the Allegorical Imperative.” Studies in Romanticism 34 (Spring 1995)
  

• “Studies on Hysteria: Case Histories and the Case Against History.” Modern Language Notes 104.5 (1989)