No Small Matter: 英语 Professor Finishes 11-year Journey to Write First Book

作为一个年轻的女孩, Laura Forsberg’s father read her Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” thoroughly explaining the minutia of the era’s manners and etiquette. Her world of wonder was magnified through literature and now the Rockhurst Associate Professor of 英语, 作者, and new mom is providing a similar opportunity to others through her first book, 由著名的耶鲁大学出版社出版.

“超越世界:微缩与维多利亚小说,” which examines how Victorians imagined miniature worlds beyond perception, 上市销售, libraries, and collections in 2021, the result of an 11-year process Forsberg started as a Ph.D. 哈佛大学学生.

Among the reasons Forsberg first became interested in miniatures was because it occurred to her that many times when women were spoken of, 那是一种很小的语言.

“我开始想，‘这总是让人失去力量吗? Is that always something that means that you are peripheral and secondary, or could there be some sort of alternative flip side to it?’”

Forsberg found that there seemed to be an expansiveness associated with miniatures.

“如果女人和微缩模型联系在一起, 它似乎正在寻找一种方式来表明这是非常小的, 但它实际上打开了一个全新的世界,她说.

作为一个实际的例子, 福斯伯格写的是显微镜, as they became affordable and popular in society during the 19th century.

“If you look at something like a water trap, you don't see anything that's there,她说.

“你通过显微镜观察它, and suddenly you realize that it's a swarming field of active life. 所以，这种渺小让你获得了某种解脱.”

This liberation extends to miniature books painstakingly made by hand during the era, 她在哈佛开始欣赏这一点.

“Harvard has a collection of six of the Brontës’ juvenile manuscripts,她说. “They're about an inch and half to two-inch-tall manuscripts that the Brontës crafted when they were young children. 夏洛特12岁的时候, 她开始在这个小小的, 小脚本, and she starts rewriting a sort of version of the Napoleonic Wars and writing about epic struggles in West Africa. With these romances and soldiers waging wars across the plains (she and her brother drew maps of this area) they're really imagining an entire world on a scale that is sized to match her brother's toy soldiers. And I thought, ‘Okay, this sort of clinches that the miniature is real.’

“And I think we see that happen in her later writings and something like ‘Jane Eyre,’ which is about the claustrophobic world of governesses,福斯伯格继续说道. “You get these little hints where Jane Eyre looks at the horizon and she thinks just beyond that horizon, “有更多的东西是属于我的.’”

弗斯伯格毕业于普林斯顿大学(B.A. 哈佛大学(M.A. 英语,Ph值.D. 她在2010年开始了这个项目作为她的论文. She finished her dissertation in 2016 and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Huntington 图书馆, 艺术博物馆, and Botanical Gardens educational and research institution in San Marino, 加州.

“It’s an incredible honor to hold a year-long fellowship at the Huntington,她说. “It allowed me to work with people who are working on their fourth or fifth book manuscripts and, and they helped me figure out how exactly do I reshape this? 我该如何将这些内容呈现给发行商?”

利用同事的建议, Forsberg redrafted her manuscript and reached out to Yale at the end of the year, ultimately agreeing to a contract just as she arrived at Rockhurst in 2017.

“I think having Yale University Press publish the book automatically gives it gives it 作者ity,她说. “It automatically indicates that this is the sort of book that could really have a far-ranging impact. 这不仅仅是一部文学批评作品, 这也是文化史, and allows individuals to reconceive their place in the world.”

福斯伯格希望读者, 包括她的学生, come to the realization that sometimes the greatest transformations happen through the smallest objects.

“Sometimes those smallest things end up being the most deeply and most inwardly transformational, because they radically allow you to revise your point of view so that in a world where we're always thinking bigger, 更好的, 更多的, instead you could think about the ways in which a single voice, a tiny thing could allow a radically different way to conceive of the world.

“And that's something I take with me in my encounters with Rockhurst students,她继续说. “我的课程可能有很大的目的, but it might be one tiny moment that we have together that really ends up lingering with that student and ends up changing them. Or it might be the one paper they write or the one 英语 class that they take that ends up shifting their point of view. So small matters in an age when we are always hearing that what matters is the biggest, 最大, 最坚定的.”

Forsberg believes Rockhurst provides a unique learning environment in which those small interactions with students can have big, 对他们的未来产生持久的影响.

“I am really astonished by the fact that professors and students get to have these really close relationships, 罗克赫斯特真的相信"个人库. I think the really transformative learning experiences take place in an environment where we care about each other at a really genuine level and where students aren't just learning about texts – they're learning about how those might speak to them and to their experiences,她继续说. “这就是我喜欢罗克赫斯特的原因.”