Reclamation, Reclamation, Reclamation: Place, Voice, and Text in Premodern Critical Practice. An Interview with David Wallace

Abstract

David Wallace is currently Chair of Comparative Literature and Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The following interview took place in London on 21 July 2005, within earshot of the police response to what turned out to be the failed bombing of Warren Street tube station. It took as its point of departure his most recent published volume Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). A graduate of the University of York, David Wallace completed his Ph. D. at Cambridge in 1983 before moving to America. After a year as a Mellon Fellow at Stanford, he was appointed Associate Professor in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and then, from 1991, Paul W. Frenzel Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota prior to taking up his current post at Pennsylvania in 1996. His continued comparativist interest in Italian late-medieval literature and culture is apparent throughout his published work, from his monograph Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985) and his Italian contributions to the volume edited by A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), to his volume for the Landmarks of World Literature series, Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In 1998 he was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize for the best book by a member of the MLA for the volume Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). As an editor he oversaw both The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and, together with Carolyn Dinshaw, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).