THE AUTHOR
JAMES F. ENGLISH is Professor of English and the Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (1994), The Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction (2005), and The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, which was named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.