Lilian Renée Furst 1931–2009

Lilian R. Furst, Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature, emerita, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, died at her home in Chapel Hill on September 11, 2009.

Lilian taught at Chapel Hill from 1986 to 2005 and for many of those years regularly attended and read papers at the annual meetings of the scla and was an enthusiastic supporter of the organization. When I became chair of Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill in 1994, she encouraged me to attend the fall meeting in Raleigh and become involved with the organization, praising it for the quality of the papers presented and the collegiality of the people attending. The scla meeting was high on her list of conferences that she encouraged our graduate students to attend because she thought it was conference where they would get encouragement and positive feedback. Travel money for students in Comparative Literature, however, had been scarce, and when a few years into my chairmanship a former doctoral student of hers anonymously started donating $3500 a year as the “Lilian Furst Fund” for her to spend as she pleased, she, with her usual concern for the students, directed me to divide it into seven annual $500 travel scholarships so that students could more easily attend conferences.

She was the author or editor of twenty-three books, at least 106 articles (none of which, so far as I know, were repeated in the books), and over 80 reviews. She wrote major studies of Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, irony, and narrative technique, and, in later years, she became a leading figure in the emerging field of literature and medicine. One of her books, Romanticism (1969) was translated into Japanese, Greek, Korean, and Malaysian, and her study of Naturalism (1971) into Greek, Portuguese, and Korean. As her friend and colleague, Professor Madeline Levine, wrote in a notice of her death sent out to students and faculty, “Her scholarship was wideranging and accessible to both scholars and educated laypersons—a trait she took great pride in.”

Born in Vienna in 1931, she escaped in 1939 with her parents, who were dental surgeons, to Manchester, England (where fortunately there was a shortage of dentists) shortly after the Nazis moved into Austria. Many years later, after her father’s death she discovered among his papers an account he wrote of the problems the family faced during those years. Lilian edited this and added to it in alternating chapters her own memories of this period, giving a child’s perspective in juxtaposition to the adult’s. The resulting book Home Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices (1994), is one of her most widely-read works. A translation into German that appeared this past fall will make it available to even more readers. She regularly taught a comparative literature course in the literature of adolescence, and she wrote, “I am aware each time I teach my course . . . just how close I came to the fate of Anne Frank.” She received her B. A. degree with honors in French and German at the University of Manchester in 1952, and, unable at that time to specialize in Comparative Literature in England, received her doctorate in German from Cambridge University in 1957. She taught in the German Department of Queen’s University, Belfast for twelve years (beginning in 1955) and then for about four years as head of Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Manchester. She thought, however, that there was higher regard for Comparative Literature in the United States and moved to this country in 1970, holding positions at the University of Oregon and the University of Texas at Dallas before moving permanently to Chapel Hill. She also held year-long visiting faculty appointments at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, William and Mary, and Case Western Reserve. Among the many honors she received during her academic career were fellowships from acls, the Guggenheim Foundation and neh, a year’s residency at the National Humanities Center, summer appointments for eleven years at the Stanford Humanities Center, and in 2006 an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she was the...