Areas of Interest: Samuel Johnson and 18th Century Literature
William Edinger, Associate Professor Emeritus, holds an A.B. degree in English from Stanford University and Master´s and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His teaching interests include Shakespeare, eighteenth-century British literature, forms of the short poem in English, the history of criticism and literary theory, and Samuel Johnson and the Enlightenment. His research interests have encompassed the history of criticism and literary theory from Plato to the Romantic period, with a special focus on Samuel Johnson. He has produced, in addition to articles, reviews, and conference papers, a book on Johnson entitled Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style (University of Chicago Press, 1977), and a monograph entitled Johnson and Detailed Representation: The Significance of the Classical Sources (English Literary Studies: University of Victoria, BC, Canada, 1997).
Professor Edinger has received grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, and in 1977-78 was an Andrew Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard. At UMBC he helped to found the University´s Honors College as well as the English Department´s Honors Program, which he directed for seventeen years.