Jay Clayton

Jay Clayton (born July 11, 1951) is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism.

He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film.

He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.

Clayton attended Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas and The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before going on to receive his B.A. from Yale University.

Surveying American fiction and literary theory from the 1970s-1990s, Clayton argued for the political and social power of narratives.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1979.

His first book Romantic Vision and the Novel, published by Cambridge University Press in 1987, compared Victorian realist fiction with romantic poetry.

It proposed a theory of Romantic visionary moments in nineteenth-century English fiction as lyric disruptions of the narrative line.

He taught English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving to Vanderbilt University in 1988.

His book on multiculturalism in American fiction and theory, Pleasures of Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, was selected by Choice as An Outstanding Academic Book for 1995.

Clayton was an early adopter of digital approaches to pedagogy, teaching classes on hypertext and computer games beginning in 1996.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999.

As Chair of the English department at Vanderbilt from 2003 to 2010, he helped recruit renowned professors to the university.

His best known book, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, was published by Oxford University Press in 2003.

It won the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship in 2004.

Moving from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Clayton shows how Victorian literature and technology reverberates in contemporary American culture.

In 2013, he launched a highly successful MOOC on the Coursera platform titled “Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative,” which has reached over 85,000 students from more than 120 countries around the world.

More recently, his classes have focused on literature, genetics, and science policy.