Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory. She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics.
Jackson is the author of the definition of "Lyric" in the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. With Yopie Prins, she is the editor of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Jackson studied comparative literature at UCLA and Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D. She taught at Boston University, Rutgers University, New York University, and Tufts University before going to Irvine in 2012. Her first book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) won both the MLA Prize for a First Book and the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa Her most recent book is Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (2023), which the poet Terrance Hayes describes as "a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions," in which Jackson "unearths the overlooked, undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry, and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit.â She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for her work on the history of American poetry.
Articles and Essays
2022 âÂÂApostrophe, Animation, and Racismâ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 48 Issue 4, Summer, 652-675
2022 âÂÂOld Lyric Things,â What Kind of Thing is a Medieval Lyric? ed. Nicholas Watson and Cristina Cervone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2020 âÂÂHistorical Poetics and the Dream of Interpretation: A Response to Paul Fry, Modern Language Quarterly, 81:3 (September 2020), 289-318.
2019 "Poe's Common Meter," in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 121-139.
2019 âÂÂThe Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics,â in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 87-106.
2018 âÂÂâÂÂOur PoetsâÂÂ: William Cullen Bryant and the White Romantic Lyric,â New Literary History, 49:4 (Autumn 2018), 521-551.
2016 âÂÂAmerican Romanticism, Again,â Studies in Romanticism, 55 (Fall 2016), 319-346.
2016 âÂÂSpecters of the Ballad,â Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 71, No. 2, 176-196.
2014 âÂÂLongfellow in His Time,â Chapter 11 of The Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 238-259.
2012 âÂÂThe Poet as Poetess,â The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Kerry Larson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),54-76.
2012 âÂÂLyric,â The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Fourth Edition, ed. Roland Greene, et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 826-834.
2010 âÂÂPeriodization and its Discontents,â Introduction to On Periodization: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 2008
2008 âÂÂThinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry,â in The Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Mary Loeffelholz and Martha Nell Smith (Blackwell Publishing), 205-221.
2008 âÂÂBryant; or, American Romanticism,â in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (Rutgers University Press, 2008), 185-204.
2008 âÂÂWho Reads Poetry?â PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, January, 181-187.
2008 âÂÂThe Story of Boon; or, Parables of the Poetess,â ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , vol. 54, nos. 1-4, December, 240-268.
2005. âÂÂAmerican Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic,â Victorian Poetry, 43:2, Summer (Virginia Jackson, Guest Editor), 157-164.
2005 âÂÂDickinson Undone,â Raritan (Spring), Vol. XXIV, Number 4, 128-148.
2000 âÂÂPoetry and Experience,â Raritan (Fall), Vol. XX, Number 2., 126-135.
2000 âÂÂPoe, Longfellow, and the Institution of Poetry,â Poe Studies. Vol. 33, numbers 1 and 2, 23-28.
Reviews and Public Writing:
2021 "Triptych for Lauren," Critical Inquiry Blog, July 19, 2021
2021 âÂÂHow Does It Feel to Be a Problem?â The Georgia Review, Spring 2021
2021 âÂÂThe Poetry of the Pastâ (with Meredith Martin), Avidly, Los Angeles Review of Books, February 18
2021 âÂÂThe Poetry of the Futureâ (with Meredith Martin), Avidly, Los Angeles Review of Books, January
2015 âÂÂThe Function of Criticism at the Present Time,â Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12