page_title: Richard Stang
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Stang
caption_attribution_description: English: Black and white photograph of Dr. Richard Stang, taken by his wife, Susan Hacker Stang, in St. Louis.
context_page_description: Richard Stang was an American literary critic, author, scholar, and professor whose groundbreaking insights on the nineteenth-century English novel have shaped the attitudes of subsequent writers and critics for more than five decades. He was the first critic to recognize and document the sophistication of contemporary mid-Victorian criticism of the novel, and to show that it in effect amounted to a holistic aesthetics of fiction for the English novel in the mid-century.
  Published simultaneously in New York and London in 1959, Stang’s Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870, was hailed by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction as "A systematic, impressive study uncovering 'modern' doctrines about fiction in forgotten publications before James." Stang's subsequent books on George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford, along with key articles and essays, further extended his cogent questioning and correcting of widely held critical assumptions about the art of fiction. As a professor of Victorian studies and 19th century literature at Washington University in St.
context_section_description: Richard Stang (July 3, 1925 – December 14, 2011) was an American literary critic, author, scholar, and professor whose groundbreaking insights on the nineteenth-century English novel have shaped the attitudes of subsequent writers and critics for more than five decades.  He was the first critic to recognize and document the sophistication of contemporary mid-Victorian criticism of the novel, and to show that it in effect amounted to a holistic aesthetics of fiction for the English novel in the mid-century.
  
  Published simultaneously in New York and London in 1959, Stang’s Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870, was hailed by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction as "A systematic, impressive study uncovering 'modern' doctrines about fiction in forgotten publications before James."  Stang's subsequent books on George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford, along with key articles and essays, further extended his cogent questioning and correcting of widely held critical assumptions about the art of  fiction. As a professor of Victorian studies and 19th century literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught for more than 35 years, Stang was an integral member of a vital literary community that included novelists Stanley Elkin and  William Gass, poets Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, Donald Finkel, and John Morris, and editor and publisher of Perspective Jarvis Thurston.
caption: Stang in 1994.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2696", "Image ImageLength": "2757", "Image BitsPerSample": "16", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "1", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "1", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2012:02:17 13:34:00", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "374", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6695", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "587", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "600"}