Jane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American

literary scholar Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. T ...

who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism. She has also coined and developed the notion of

cultural work Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tylor ...

literary studies Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Th ...

and contributed to the new historicist form of literary criticism that emerged in the 1980s. She earned her

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1966 and subsequently taught at

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptists, Baptist minister Russell Conwell an ...

, Duke University, and the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the University of Illinois s ...

. She is married to cultural critic Stanley Fish.

Cultural work

Tompkins developed her idea of texts doing cultural work in her 1985 book ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. She argues that texts (e.g. novels) do "a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation." To her, "plots and characters" provide "society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions. It is the notion of literary texts as doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them, that I wish to substitute finally for the critical perspective that sees them as attempts to achieve a timeless, universal ideal of truth and formal coherence."Jane Tompkins. ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 200

Books

* ''Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1870''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. * ''West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. * ''A Life In School: What The Teacher Learned''. New York: Perseus Books, 1996. * ''Reading Through The Night''. University of Virginia Press, 2018.

References

1940 births American academics of English literature American literary critics Women literary critics Literary critics of English Living people American women critics {{US-academic-stub