Audrey Jaffe

Biography

working as Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. working as Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Research Interest

Professor Jaffe’s research and teaching focus on the Victorian novel. Her most recent book, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (2016), argues for the real as an object of desire—and hence fantastical construction—in Victorian fiction. Scenes of Sympathy (2000) reconceived Victorian sympathy as an imagined exchange of identities. She has also written about the relation between the stock market, Victorian finance, and the measurement of emotion (The Affective Life of the Average Man;2010) and the idea of omniscience in Dickens (Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience; 1991). Her essay on affect and the Victorian novel is forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Affect and Textual Studies, and she is currently writing about the relation between sociology and the Victorian novel and on the “class” idea in Victorian fiction and culture. Professor Jaffe regularly teaches English 324--a year-long undergraduate course on British fiction—as well as a variety of courses and seminars on such topics as Victorian realism; Victorian character; affect and the novel; the novel and everyday life; sociology and the novel, and the construction of space and place in Victorian realist fiction.