Clare Eby

Professor, English

Clare Eby has been drawn to interdisciplinary projects since her dissertation on images of the businessman in American fiction. Her work on the realist/naturalist novel in relation to the iconoclastic cultural critic Thorstein Veblen (whose training was in political economy) culminated in Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo (1998). Eby has edited a version of Dreiser’s most autobiographical novel (The Genius [2008]) never before in print, The Norton Critical Edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle [2002], and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser [2004] and The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011). Her most recent book, Until Choice Do Us Part: The Theory and Practice of Marital Reform in the Progressive Era (2014), was published in University of Chicago Press’s history series.  She is now researching a monograph tentatively called “The Zero Sum Game of Corporate Personhood,”which argues that the continued extension of “rights” to corporations, enabled by the legal fiction that they are persons, leads to the erosion of rights for human citizens.

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