Eric Walker receives 2010 SAMLA Book Award

The South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) has awarded Eric Walker the 2010 Book Award for his book, Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War. This award is presented at the annual convention to an author of an outstanding scholarly book published during the previous calendar year.

On November 6, 2010, Dr. Nathaniel Wallace, Professor at South Carolina State University and Chair of the SAMLA Studies Book Award Committee, cited the following reasons for selecting Professor Walker's text:

"Marriage, Writing, & Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War, published by Stanford University Press in 2009, very successfully demonstrates that concerns regarding marriage are pervasive in the discourse of Romanticism. The Committee found your study to be alluringly innovative yet astute and traditional in its approach to literary texts and methodology. Your argument was viewed as consistently insightful and critically independent as you pursued a program of close reading that intermingled philosophical writings, poetry, and fiction. You revealed subservience to no single hermeneutic method of fulcrum, nor was there a sense of awed readership with respect to any one text or author.

The many elements of this discussion are happily coordinated, demonstrate high interpretive competence, and educate the reader sentence by sentence. The discourse of marriage is suddenly before us, an informing factor in numerous sectors of the Romantic canon. In such varied textual sites, a dynamics of marriage may have been barely noticed - and certainly, not so well understood - prior to your monograph."