Sarah Bliss’s research and teaching focus on British periodicals and genre fiction in the nineteenth century. She is interested in how the media ecologies of the nineteenth century altered how fiction was circulated and interpreted.
Her dissertation project, Stabilizing Detective Fiction in Victorian Periodicals, resituates canonical and noncanonical examples of detective fiction within their original periodical contexts. By reading detective novels like Hound of the Baskervilles in the context of fiction and nonfiction pieces appearing alongside them in their host periodicals, Sarah uncovers the dialogical relationship between fiction and container. Her second major project, Investigating Empire: Detective Fiction in the Local Scottish Press, reads how county newspapers used fiction to define local and imperial identities, and has been supported by a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Beyond these projects, Sarah’s interests in periodical studies and book history range across the nineteenth century. She has trained as a book historian in a scholarship-funded course at Rare Books School at the University of Virginia and has articles in press or forthcoming on Victorian novels, penny fiction, and eighteenth-century Gothic fiction.
In her teaching, Sarah helps students consider the relationship between how a text travels through the world and how it is interpreted. She has taught a range of courses from History of Text Technologies to Women in Literature: The Lady Detective, and she is currently teaching a course on book history and literary analysis for the Honors Program: Books as Objects or Literature.
Sarah Bliss