Professor Lloyd Pratt

Lloyd Pratt
Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature
lloyd.pratt@ell.ox.ac.uk

American Literature, African American Literature, Literatures of the American South, The Novel, Theory and Criticism, Gender and Sexuality, History of the Book, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

American Literature, African American Literature, Literatures of the American South, The Novel, Theory and Criticism, Gender and Sexuality, History of the Book, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

Lloyd Pratt has been a Mellon Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a National Endowment for the Humanities (US) Long-Term Fellow and NEMLA Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities/Bay State Historical League Scholar in Residence at the Nantucket Atheneum, and a Verney Fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. With Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, he also received a National Endowment for the Arts (US) New Forms Regional Grant. He co-directed (with Jeannine DeLombard) the American Antiquarian Society's 2010 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in America, has served on the Modern Language Association's Division Executive Committee on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and was elected to the founding executive committee of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and an appointed member of the AHRC Peer Review College. He is a member of the editorial board of American Literature and an associate editor of NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Before joining the Oxford English Faculty, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Michigan State University. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford. In 2015 Pratt joined the Bread Loaf Faculty at Oxford; he was the 2015-2016 Pierce Visiting Scholar at Oxford College of Emory University. 

Publications

  • Locality and the Serial South

    2016
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South
    The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature.
    History

  • The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature

    2015
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    Book
    The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas. Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.
    Literary Criticism

  • Historic Totality and the African American Archive

    2014
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    Chapter
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    Unauthorized States

  • Early American Literature and Its Exclusions

    2013
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    Journal article
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    PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

  • Early American literature and its exclusions

    2013
    |
    Journal article
    |
    PMLA
    • More