StevenMentz
Assistant Professor of
English
St. John's College of Arts and Sciences
Queens Campus, St. John's Hall, Rm. B40-9
(718) 990-6690
mentzs@stjohns.edu
Office Hours, Spring 2006
Tuesday/Thursday: 8:00 - 9:00 A.M., 11:00 - 12:00 P.M.
Education
2000 Ph.D., English Literature, Yale University
1998 M. Phil., M.A., English Literature, Yale
University
1989 A.B., summa cum laude, English Literature, Princeton
University
Honors & Fellowships
2004 Summer Research Stipend, St. John's University
2003 Merit Award, Iona College, First Tier (top 10% of
faculty)
2002 Merit Award, Iona College, Third Tier (top 40% of
faculty)
1999 Folger Institute Grant, Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington, DC
1998-99 Robert M. Leylan Prize Fellowship in the Humanities,
Yale University
1998 John F. Enders Research Grant, Yale University
1997 Beinecke Library Summer Research Fellowship, Yale
University
1995-1997 Chauncey Brewster Tinker Fellowship, Yale
University
1989 Francis LeMoyne Page Prize in Creative Writing,
Princeton University
1988 Ward Prize in Creative Writing, Princeton
University
Dissertation
"Romance for Sale: Genre and the Book Market in Elizabethan
Prose Fiction." Director: Professor Annabel Patterson, Yale
University
Current Projects
Romance for Sale: Prose Fiction and Elizabethan Literary
Culture. This book examines the growth of printed prose
fiction in early modern England, with special attention to the
influence of recently rediscovered Greek romance, the impact of
printing technologies and market practices on literary behavior,
and the rivalry between the stage, the printing house, and the
manuscript book. I focus on the careers of Robert Greene, Thomas
Nashe, Philip Sidney, and Thomas Lodge.
The Shipwreck Machine. This currently-beginning project
looks at scenes of shipwreck in literary and visual culture as a
master-trope that examines the relationship between human beings
and inhuman power, the nature of risk and chance, and the role of
literary form in explaining mortality and the natural world to
human sensibilities.
Publications
Books
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, co-edited with
Craig Dionne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
Articles
"Escaping Italy: From Novella to Romance in Gascoigne and Lyly."
Studies in Philology, 101:2 (Spring 2004) 253-71.
"Romance at Sea: Shipwreck and the Narrative Experiment of
Sidney's New Arcadia" Studies in
English Literature 44.1 (Winter 2004): 1-18.
"The Heroine as Courtesan: Dishonesty, Romance, and the Sense of
an Ending in The Unfortunate Traveler." Studies in
Philology 98 (2001): 339-58.
"Selling Sidney: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the
Boundaries of Elizabethan Print and Manuscript Cultures."
TEXT 13 (2000): 151-74.
"Wearing Greene: Autolycus, Robert Greene, and the Structure of
Romance in The Winter's Tale."
Renaissance Drama 30 (1999-2001): 73-92.
"Escaping Italy: The Crisis of the English Novella in Gascoigne
and Lyly" (Studies in Philology, forthcoming Spring
2004).
Chapters
"The Thigh and the Sword: Gender, Genre, and Sexy Dressing
in Sidney's New Arcadia." Prose Fiction
and Early Modern Sexualities. Goran Stanivukovic and Constance
Relihan, eds. (New York: Palgrave, 2003): 77-91.
"The Fiend Gives Friendly Counsel: Launcelot Gobbo and Polyglot
Economics in The Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare and the Age
of Money. Linda Woodbridge, ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2003):
177-87.
"Magic Books: Robert Greene's Cony-Catching Pamphlets and the
Romance of Early Modern London." Rogues
and Early Modern English Culture. Mentz and Dionne, eds.
(University of Michigan Press, 2004): 240-58.
Book Reviews
Bryan Reynolds, Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and
Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002), Clio: A Journal of Literature,
History, and the Philosophy of History 33:1 (2003): 73-77.
Barnebe Riche, His Farewell to Military Profession,
Donald Beecher, ed., (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992),
Shakespeare Newsletter 50:4 (Winter 2000-1): 95, 108.
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in
the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30 (2000):
636-37.
Review Essays
Early Modern Rogue Scholarship. Shakespeare
Newsletter 53:1 (Spring 2003): 9, 16.
Teaching Interests
I have taught and developed a wide variety of courses in and out of
the Renaissance, including a course in the History of the Novel
from the Greek romance of Heliodorus to the late twentieth-century,
courses in Seventeenth-century poetry and poetic practice,
Shakespeare and performance, and various kinds of writing
workshops, including several that took the New Yorker magazine as
their primary text. Other teaching interests include Renaissance
fiction, drama, poetry; Spenser; Milton; Creative Writing; Medieval
poetry, biography, and fiction; History of the Romance and Prose
Fiction; Eighteenth-Century Novel; Twentieth-Century Novel;
International Novel in English; Urban Culture in the Renaissance;
Cultural Poetics of Shipwreck; Latin American fiction and
poetry.
Papers Presented
"Mars will sometime be prying into Venus papers: Generic
Competition and Women Readers of Elizabethan Prose Romance."
Shakespeare Association of America. New orleans, LA. April
2004.
"So many heades: Heliodorus, Robert Greene, and the Invention of
Popular Fiction in Elizabethan Engliand." Renaissance Society of
America. New York, NY. March 2004.
"Magic Books: Cony-Catching and the Early Modern City." Midwest
Conference for British Studies. Bloomington, IL, November 2003.
"The Shipwreck Machine in Early Modern Literary Culture."
Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Vancouver, BC. April,
2003.
"Greene's Ghosts: Haunting the Literary Marketplace in 1590s
London." Narrative Society Conference. Berkeley, CA. March,
2003.
"The Homer of Women: 'Sharing' and 'Pollice' Among English
Readers of Greene's Penelope's Web." Group for Early Modern
Cultural Studies (GEMCS). Tampa, FL. November, 2002.
"Magic Books: Robert Greene's Cony-Catching Pamphlets and the
Romance of Early Modern London." Renaissance Society of America.
Scottsdale, AZ. April, 2002.
"Romance, Repentance, and the Devil in Robin Greene."
Shakespeare Society of America. Minneapolis, MN. March, 2002.
"'The Fiend Gives Friendly Counsel': Launcelot Gobbo and
Economic Discourses in The Merchant of Venice." SAA. Miami, FL.
March, 2001
"Rosalynde: Reading an Elizabethan Book." Modern Language
Association of America (MLA). Washington, DC. December, 2000.
"Simultaneity and Early Modern Print Culture." Group for Early
Modern Cultural Studies. New Orleans, LA. November, 2000.
"Greene's Ghosts: Chasing a Readership in 1590s London." "The
History of the Book: The Next Generation." Drew University,
Madison, NJ. September, 2000.
"Sexy Dressing in Sidney's New Arcadia." Shakespeare Association
of America (SAA). San Francisco, CA. April, 1999.
"Publishing Arcadia: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the
Struggle for an Elizabethan Author." MLA. San Francisco, CA.
December, 1998.
"Pastiche at Century's End: Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate
Traveler and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon." Central New York
Conference of Language and Literature (CNYCLL). Cortland, NY.
October, 1998.
"The Goddess Before the Novel: Chariclea's Combination of Diana
and Odysseus in Heliodorus's Ethiopian History." Northeastern
Modern Language Association (NEMLA). Baltimore, MD. April,
1998.
"'Kiss the Book': Books, Power, and the Structure of The
Tempest." SAA. Cleveland, OH. March, 1998
"'Not Naturally Honest': Recovering Published Fiction in The
Winter's Tale." Ohio Shakespeare Conference. Columbus, OH. May,
1997.
"Escaping Italy: Tactics of Revision in Lyly and Gascoigne."
Northern California Renaissance Conference. Davis, CA. April,
1997.
"'Making a Puritan of the Devil': The Persuasive Force of Greek
Romance in Pericles." SAA. Washington, DC. March, 1997.
"Shaping Robert Greene: The Structure of Thought in the
Groatsworth of Wit." CNYCLL. Cortland, New York. October, 1996.
"The New News at the New Court: Charles the Wrestler and
Economic Sacrifice in As You Like It." SAA. Los Angeles, CA. March,
1996.
"'A Lady's Verily': Shrews, Griseldas, and Hermione's Power in
The Winter's Tale." SAA. Chicago, IL. March, 1995.
Panels Chaired
"Simultaneity and Early Modern Print Culture." GEMCS. New Orleans,
LA. November, 2000.
"'Cony-Catching' and the Early Modern City." NEMLA. Buffalo, NY.
April 2000.
"The Urban Rogue in Seventeenth-Century English Literature."
CNYCLL. Cortland, NY. October 1998.
Professional Organizations
MLA, SAA, RSA, NEMLA, SHARP, GEMCS
Foreign Languages
Spanish, French, Latin, Old English