# Nancy Armstrong > Mediated Wiki article. Canonical URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Nancy_Armstrong > Markdown URL: https://mediated.wiki/source/Nancy_Armstrong.md > Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Armstrong > Source revision: 1348507284 > License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) {{Short description|American scholar, critic, and professor of English (born 1938)}} '''Nancy Bowes Armstrong''' (born December 17, 1938) is a scholar, critic and professor of English at [Duke University](/source/Duke_University). She is best known for her groundbreaking book on the relationship between subjectivity and the novel, ''Desire and Domestic Fiction'' (1987). ==Overview== Before moving to Duke, Armstrong was the [Nancy Duke Lewis Professor](/source/Nancy_Duke_Lewis) of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture & Media, and Gender Studies at [Brown University](/source/Brown_University). She is currently the Gilbert, Louis & Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke. She is interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative and critical theory, visual culture, and scientific discourses at work in literary forms. She is best known for her groundbreaking book on the relationship between subjectivity and the novel, ''Desire and Domestic Fiction''. == Early life and education == Amstrong was born December 17, 1938 in [New York](/source/New_York_(state)).{{Cite web |date=August 5, 2025 |title=Armstrong, Nancy, 1938- |url=https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85161263.html |access-date=April 12, 2026 |website=Library of Congress}} Armstrong received her B.A. in 1966 from the [State University of New York at Buffalo](/source/University_at_Buffalo%2C_The_State_University_of_New_York) and her Ph.D. from the [University of Wisconsin–Madison](/source/University_of_Wisconsin%E2%80%93Madison) in 1977. ==Career== Armstrong's most influential book is ''Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel'' (Oxford University Press, 1987), a work of scholarship still relevant thirty years after its publication. As one reviewer put it, the book "changed the ways in which feminist critics of these novels saw the work these texts did; it changed the way we thought about public and private, agency and oppression, writing and action, giving us a far broader sense of the cultural work that novels do, as they translate political information into narratives about sex, gender, and desire."[https://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Nancy_Armstrong "Nancy Armstrong"]. [Brown University](/source/Brown_University). Retrieved on 28 August 2007. Over the course of her career, Armstrong has published many books and nearly one hundred articles and chapters. Her two recent books are ''How Novels Think: British Fiction and the Limits of Individualism'' (Columbia University Press, 2005), which is about the relationship between the formation of the modern individual and the genre of the novel, and ''Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism'' (Harvard University Press, 1999), which lays out a theory of [realism](/source/Realism_(arts)) that connects visual culture and fiction. In 1992, Armstrong published, together with Leonard Tennenhouse, "a pioneer[ing] study in the field of transatlantic literary relations", The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (University of California Press, 1992), which looks at the relationship between the author and the emerging nation-state. Armstrong worked on a project provisionally titled ''Gothic Remains''. She has also been managing editor of ''[Novel: A Forum on Fiction](/source/Novel%3A_A_Forum_on_Fiction)'' and co-editor of the ''Encyclopedia of British Literary History''. She is a past president of the [Semiotic Society of America](/source/Semiotic_Society_of_America) (1992). ==Notes== {{reflist}} ==External links== *[http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/English/faculty/n.b.armstrong Armstrong's page at Duke] *[http://novel.trinity.duke.edu/ NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction] {{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Nancy}} Category:1938 births Category:Living people Category:Duke University faculty Category:American academics of English literature Category:University at Buffalo alumni Category:Brown University faculty Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Category:Presidents of the Semiotic Society of America --- Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Nancy Armstrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Armstrong) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Armstrong?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.