About

Dino Franco Felluga completed his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995, followed by two postdoctoral fellowships, the first at the University of Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the second in the English Department at Stanford University. His research focuses on British Literature, Critical Theory, and Digital Humanities. He has published extensively, with articles appearing in prominent journals such as SEL: Studies in English Literature, Victorian Studies, Criticism, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, Victoriographies, European Romantic Review, Critical Quarterly, 19, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, among others. His first book, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, was published by SUNY Press in 2005. He also authored the four-volume Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature and Critical Theory: The Key Concepts, and co-authored Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form (2024) with Emily Allen, published by Oxford University Press. Additionally, he is the general editor of BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History and COVE: Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education. Prof. Felluga created the North American Victorian Studies Association and served as NAVSA's president for the first 11 years of the organization.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Law
• Linguistics
• Literature
• Archaeology
• Gender studies
• Art

Selected publications

• Experimenting with the Future: Event 2024

  Victorian Studies · 2025-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Assembling the 1870s

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-30

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Lord Byron and Genre

  2024-08-05

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Byron’s poetry, especially Don Juan, has had a vexed relationship with critical efforts to make sense of Romanticism and of the genres that make up this field of study. One clear reason for this poor canonical fit is because Wordsworth and Coleridge were so influential in disseminating the expressivist theory of kairotic lyric poetry that came to define not only Romanticism but also poetry itself. This chapter asks: Does the history of generic form—especially of the two generic dominants of twentieth-century criticism, the lyric and the novel—look different when Byron’s Don Juan is factored into the historical equation? We examine how Byron’s poetry works against the new formal principles of both narrative and lyric, and we illustrate the ways that he proposes a more radical approach to event and temporality that is inspired by the French Revolution and that resembles Alain Badiou’s concepts, event and future anterior.

  PublisherDOI

• COVE, One More Voice, and the Recovery of BIPOC Voices from Victorian Periodicals

  Victorian periodicals review · 2024-09-01

  article

  Abstract: This essay discusses how work from two grants dedicated to recovering the voices of people of color can transform (1) the collaborative nature of grant-funded research and (2) the way we teach literature in the classroom. The essay ends with a case study, illustrating how this new material can transform the teaching of canonical literature, specifically Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre .

  PublisherDOI

• Robert Browning and the Virtuous Act

  2024-08-05

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract In this chapter, we tease out the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh on Robert Browning’s approach to temporality. We argue that Browning abandons “realist time” in favor of a temporality that more closely resembles the future anterior we have been exploring in this book. We are not claiming that such a temporality is a taxonomic feature of the verse-novel—and, as we saw in Chapters Seven and Eight, it often is not—but we wish to illustrate that there was a formal alternative in the period, however strange such a temporal structure may appear to us following the hegemonic success of the novel and our tendency to adopt the novel’s form of temporality in understanding our own lives. We explore these issues in Ring and the Book by examining Browning’s approach to questions of truth (especially representation) and questions of virtue (especially virtuous acts).

  PublisherDOI

• The Problem of Form

  2024-08-05

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter asks how we should understand the relation of “verse” and “novel” in the designation “verse-novel”? The question raises larger issues about what is knowable and what can be designated in a set—for example, the set that constitutes “verse,” which we have tended to understand as distinct from the set that constitutes “novel.” We turn to Alain Badiou, Paul Cohen, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wai Chee Dimock, and fractal geometry to offer a new theory of genre that we apply to the verse-novel in the chapters that follow. We distinguish this approach from other types of formalism, especially “strategic formalism,” which is proposed by Caroline Levine, and “surface reading,” which is theorized by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. We finish by distinguishing our understanding of the verse-novel from past approaches to the genre.

  PublisherDOI

• Novel-Poetry

  2024-08-05 · 1 citations

  bookSenior author

  Abstract Novel-Poetry examines the verse-novel, a hybrid genre that emerged in the middle decades of Britain’s nineteenth century, and makes a larger claim about both the nature of genre and formal structures for time, action, and identity that cross genres. The authors uncover trajectories of literary influence that have gone unseen because of how we have come to understand basic categories—such as lyric and narrative—that structure our approach to literature and affect how we shape our lives, lives which are often constrained by cause-and-effect, narrative-driven ways of approaching time and possibility. Novel-Poetry tracks an alternative way of thinking about time and event that was inspired by the French Revolution, popularized by Lord Byron, and explored by experimental Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. The authors turn to the work of philosophers Alain Badiou, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Slavoj Žižek to theorize this alternative mode, which they align with the “futur antérieur.” The temporality of the future anterior disrupts both the novel’s realist chronologies and the expressivist lyric’s cult of “the moment,” thus liberating possibilities for collective action. Ranging widely across romantic lyric poetry, Victorian novels, and both nineteenth-century and contemporary literary theory, Novel-Poetry asks, what alternative structures and temporalities does a focus on either realistic narrative or the lyric moment occlude? Are there ways of thinking about lived experience and personal or collective agency that do not conform to traditional models, ways that the verse-novel might help us to explore? What might be gained today from trying to think about ourselves and our world outside of established frameworks that are now so naturalized as to feel almost inescapable?

  PublisherDOI

• List of Figures

  2024-08-05

  paratextSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Poem/Novel

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • Art

  This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2024-08-05

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The introduction illustrates how we have come to adopt our current understanding of the lyric and narrative, which began to be formulated in the eighteenth century and would eventually be aligned with the opposition kairos vs. chronos, as theorized in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. The role of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in imagining a realm of “high” culture for poetry is discussed and Frank Kermode’s argument is revisited. The introduction concludes by arguing that our current understanding of generic distinctions keeps us from making sense of cross-generic forms like the verse-novel or the ways that poetry and the novel were in dialogue with each other regarding time, action, and subjectivity.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily Allen

  16 shared

• Tom Mole

  University of Edinburgh

  2 shared

• David Rettenmaier

  Purdue University System

  1 shared

• Priyanka A. Jacob

  1 shared

• Pamela K. Gilbert

  1 shared

• Rebecca Nesvet

  1 shared

• Diane Piccitto

  1 shared

• Linda K. Hughes

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, English

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1995

• M.A., English

  Queen's University

  1990

• Honors B.A., English

  Western University

  1989