Steven E. Jones

I am delighted to be here today with you to celebrate Steve Jones and his many achievements in our field over the past twenty-five years. I was fortunate to share some of those years with him as a graduate student at Loyola. Steve introduced me to Romanticism, he directed my dissertation, and was, as you can imagine, everything one would want in a mentor and more. All of us in this room know how richly Steve deserves this award, and each of us can attest to the groundbreaking work he has done in Romanticism, textual studies, and the digital humanities. I can add to this, from my perspective, that as my advisor Steve provided me with a model for scholarship that I strive to emulate in my own career. It is a gift that I will always be thankful for, and the reason why—when I found out that Steve was going to be honored tonight—I jumped at the chance of presenting him and his work.

A portfolio of scholarship as diverse and wide-ranging as Steve’s deserves more voices than mine. For this reason recently I asked some of our colleagues if they had anything they would like to add to this presentation. The chorus of praise for Steve’s accomplishments that I received was amazing. It actually seemed like there was a pent-up demand for just this kind of moment—for friends, colleagues, and admirers of Steve’s work to step forward and attest to the many ways in which his vision and his work have mattered to them personally, to our discipline and beyond. I wish I could quote them all fully here, but that would go well beyond the time allotted for this introduction.

Reading the words of these other scholars as they reflected upon Steve’s contributions to Romanticism and, in some cases, the difference he has made in their lives, and thinking back on my own experiences with Steve, a consensus began to emerge. All of us share the conviction that what sets Steve apart—or, one can say, what distinguishes him from many other “distinguished scholars”—is his incredible versatility as a scholar and his commitment to critical inquiry as an ongoing communal practice. I think Andy Stauffer’s comments are particularly apt in this regard. Andy writes, “A first-rate textual and cultural critic, Steve casts nets both wide and fine, always catching the salient detail across impressive ranges of inquiry, always moving towards fresh methodologies that change the way we all work. He is also one of the great collaborators, co-conspirators, and comrades in the profession.” Another way of putting it perhaps (and this is me talking) is that Steve is both an intellectual pioneer and a visionary, but he is more than willing to share the limelight with others. He may be the smartest guy in the room, but he is also the guy voted (in my small sampling) as the person we’d mostly likely want to have a beer with (or “two or three,” as one of my pseudo-anonymous correspondents said).

Steve’s first book, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority, published in 1994, was the first book to debunk the notion, once and for all, that Shelley was characteristically and exclusively a lyrical poet, writing in a register far removed from the social particularities of satire. This groundbreaking work was widely acclaimed (Studies in Romanticism called it a “tour de force” twice), and Steve subsequently published not one but two additional books on satire in our period: Satire and Romanticism in 2000 and an edited collection, The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, in 2003. In reference to this phase of Steve’s career, Susan Wolfson notes that Steve’s “critical and scholarly work on print cultures, cartoons, parodies and politics is (and was) so sharp and informative that it has set a standard for everyone in the field.”

When I started the grad program at Loyola in 1998 Steve was already well on his way to becoming a major voice in our discipline with his work on Romantic...