Graham Thompson

Contact

• workRoom B55 Trent
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work0115 951 4269
• graham.thompson@nottingham.ac.uk

Teaching Summary

During 2023-24 I'm teaching two first-year courses on American Literature and Culture before and after 1940. I also teach a second-year course on business in American culture.

I'm currently supervising PhDs on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Californian fiction and American literature and the corporation.

I've supervised well over a dozen PhDs to completion on topics including digital literature; American women's prison zines; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American literature; John Cheever's magazine fiction; post-apocalyptic fiction; the segregated town in white Southern fiction; Ralph Waldo Emerson; the "quiet" novel in contemporary American literature; Cormac McCarthy; post-suburban American literature; the nineteenth-century American short story; transnationalism in the work of Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand; and contemporary New York and Shanghai fiction.

I have also supervised several MRes theses on subjects ranging from the sea fiction of James Fenimore Cooper to Rolling Stone magazine, the short fiction of Richard Ford, and Donna Tartt.

Research Summary

My main area of research is nineteenth-century American literature and print culture. My latest book is Herman Melville: Among the Magazines. It focuses on the writing Melville published in Putnam's… read more

Selected Publications

• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2025. A Manual Job in a Machine Age: The Long Wait for Mechanized Typesetting Book History. (In Press.)
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2022. Nineteenth-Century Transnationalism and the Literary Magazine. In: TIM LANZENDÖRFER, ed., The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine Routledge. 36-44
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2022. Melville and Periodical Culture. In: WYN KELLEY and CHRISTOPHER OHGE, eds., A New Companion to Herman Melville Wiley. 261-271
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2021. Routes into American Realism. In: DIRK GÖTTSCHE, ROSA MUCIGNAT and ROBERT WENINGER, eds., Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective John Benjamins Publishing. 213–230

• View all publications

Current Research

My main area of research is nineteenth-century American literature and print culture. My latest book is Herman Melville: Among the Magazines. It focuses on the writing Melville published in Putnam's and Harper's magazines and is the first book to ask what it means to think about this work as magazine writing rather than short fiction. The book presses Melville back into the magazine publishing world of the 1850s and draws on print culture history, biography, and literary criticism to examine Melville's relationships with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions.

I am currently working on a provisionally titled Making American Literature, which will be a media history of nineteenth-century American literature.

Future Research

Nineteenth-century print production and distribution.

American magazines in the nineteenth century.

History of the nineteenth-century short story.

• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2025. A Manual Job in a Machine Age: The Long Wait for Mechanized Typesetting Book History. (In Press.)
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2022. Melville and Periodical Culture. In: WYN KELLEY and CHRISTOPHER OHGE, eds., A New Companion to Herman Melville Wiley. 261-271
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2022. Nineteenth-Century Transnationalism and the Literary Magazine. In: TIM LANZENDÖRFER, ed., The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine Routledge. 36-44
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2021. Routes into American Realism. In: DIRK GÖTTSCHE, ROSA MUCIGNAT and ROBERT WENINGER, eds., Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective John Benjamins Publishing. 213–230
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2019. Realism and the Profession of Authorship. In: KEITH NEWLIN, ed., The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism Oxford University Press. 303–320
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2019. William Dean Howells's Periodical Time Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, & Theory. 74(4), 77-106
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2018. Herman Melville: Among the Magazines Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2018. The Seriality Dividend of American Magazines American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism. 28(1), 1–20
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2016. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens and the Materiality of Letter Writing. In: BERNIER, CELESTE-MARIE, JUDIE NEWMAN and MATTHEW PETHERS, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press.
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, BRIDGET BENNETT, RACHEL BOWLBY, ANDREW LAWSON, MARK STOREY and FREDRIC JAMESON, 2014. Roundtable Review of Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism Journal of American Studies. 48(4), 1069-1089
• THOMPSON, G., 2013. "Bartleby" and the magazine fiction. In: LEVINE, R.S., ed., The new Cambridge companion to Herman Melville Cambridge University Press.
• THOMPSON, G., 2012. The "plain facts" of fine paper in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" American Literature: A Journal of Literary History. Criticism, and Bibliography. 84(3), 505-532
• THOMPSON, G., 2012. “Through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life”:: Melville’s not quite white working bodies Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. 14(2), 25-43
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, MATTHEW PETHERS, PHILLIP H. ROUND, JOHN FAGG and EVAN BRIER, 2012. Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America Journal of American Studies. 46(2), E22
• THOMPSON, G., 2011. Periodizing the '80s: the "differential of history" in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine Modern Fiction Studies. 57(2), 300-317
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2007. American Culture in the 1980s Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2004. The Business of America: the Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation London: Pluto Press.
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2003. Male Sexuality under Surveillance: the office in American literature Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
• RUTH HOLLIDAY and GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2001. A body of work. In: RUTH HOLLIDAY and JOHN HASSARD, eds., Contested Bodies London: Routledge. 117-33
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2001. "Frank Lloyd Oop": Microserfs, Modern Migration, and the Architecture of the Nineties Canadian Review of American Studies. 31(3), 119-136
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2000. "Dead Letters … Dead Men": The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" Journal of American Studies. 34(3), 395-411
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 2000. "And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into": The Business of Sexuality in The Rise of Silas Lapham American Literary Realism. 34(1), 1-20
• GRAHAM THOMPSON, 1998. Shoelaces and Social Energy: Surveilling the Man's World of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine OVERhere: A European Journal of American Culture. 18(2), 36-53