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Beta Kappa Society, sponsor of this award, click
here.
2018
Henry David
Thoreau : a life by Laura Dassow Walls
2017
Shirley Jackson :
a rather haunted life by Ruth Franklin
2016 The poetry of John Milton
by Gordon Teskey
2015 Philology : the forgotten
origins of the modern humanities by James Turner
2014 The novel : an alternative
history, 1600-1800 by Steven Moore
2013 Jane Austen's cults and
cultures by Claudia L. Johnson
2012
A most dangerous
book : Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by
Christopher B. Krebs
2011
From
battlefields rising : how the Civil War transformed American literature
by Randall Fuller
2010
Telling
images : Chaucer and the imagery of narrative II by V.A. Kolve
2008
Henry
James goes to Paris by Peter Brooks
2007
In
search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line by George
Hutchinson
2006
Dickinson's misery
: a theory of lyric reading by Virginia Jackson
2005
Shakespeare after all by Marjorie Garber
2004
Emerson
by Lawrence Buell
2003
The Irish story : telling tales and making it up in Ireland by R. F.
Foster
2002
Poetry and the fate
of the senses by Susan Stewart
2001 Transcendental wordplay : America's
romantic
punsters and the search for the language of nature by Michael West
2000
Unearthing the past : archaeology and aesthetics in the making of
Renaissance culture by Leonard Barkan
1999
Memory & narrative : the weave of life-writing by James Olney
1998 The
mirror of
justice : literary reflections of legal crises by Theodore Ziolkowski
1997 The
title to the poem by Anne Ferry
1996 What is Pastoral?
by Paul Alpers
1995
Dostoevsky : the miraculous years, 1865-1871 by Joseph Frank
1994
The
mystery to a
solution : Poe, Borges, and the analytic detective story by John T.
Irwin
1993
To wake the nations : race in the making of
American literature
by Eric J. Sundquist
1992
Chaucer and the subject of history by Lee Patterson
1991
The
presence of the present : topics of the day in the Victorian novel by Richard D. Altick
1990
Emerson : the roots of prophecy by Evelyn Barish
1989
Ruin the sacred truths : poetry and belief from the Bible to the present
by Harold Bloom
1988
Beneath the
American Renaissance : the subversive imagination in the Age of Emerson and
Melville by David S. Reynolds
1987 The gods
made
flesh : metamorphosis and the pursuit of paganism by Leonard Barkan
1986
Alexander Pope : a life by Maynard Mack
1985
The English elegy : studies in the genre from Spenser to Yeats by
Peter M. Sacks
1984
Swift : the man,
his works, and the age, volume 3 : Dean Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis
1983 The
idea of the
lyric : lyric modes in ancient and modern poetry by W. R. Johnson
1982
The life of the poet : beginning and ending poetic careers by
Lawrence Lipking
1981
Tennyson :
the unquiet heart by Robert Bernard Martin
1980
The
creation of
Nikolai Gogol by Donald L. Fanger
1979
The ways of the world : comedy and society by Robert B. Heilman
1978
Person, place, and thing in Henry James's novels by Charles R.
Anderson
1977
Dostoevsky : the seeds of revolt, 1821-1849 by Joseph Frank
1976
T. S. Eliot : the pattern in the carpet by Elisabeth W. Schneider
1975
Young Thomas Hardy
by Robert Gittings
1974
Mandelstam
by Clarence Brown
1973
Kings,
beasts, and
heroes by Gwyn Jones
1972
The Pound era by Hugh Kenner
1971
Politics in English romantic poetry by Carl Woodring
1970
The burden of the past and the English poet by Walter Jackson Bate
1969
Shaw the Dramatist
by Louis Crompton
1968
Poetic closure : a study of how poems end by Barbara Herrnstein
Smith
1967
The American 1890s : life and times of a lost generation by Larzer
Ziff
1966
The cave and the mountain : a study of E. M. Forster by Wilfred
Stone
1965
Wordsworth's
Poetry, 1787-1814 by Geoffrey H. Hartman
1964
John Keats
by Walter Jackson Bate
1963
Contrary music : the prose style of John Donne by Joan Webber
1962
The rhetoric of fiction by Wayne C. Booth
1961
Emily Dickinson's poetry : stairway of surprise by Charles R.
Anderson
1960
Alexander Pope : the poetry of allusion by Reuben Arthur Brower
1959 The
idea of poetry
in France : from Houdar de la Motte to Baudelaire by Margaret Gilman
1958
Homer and the
Heroic Tradition by Cedric H. Whitman
1957
The Victorian frame of mind, 1830-1870 by Walter E. Houghton
1956
The
achievement of Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate
1955
The poetry
of meditation; a study of English religious literature of the seventeenth
century by Louis L. Martz
1954
The mirror and the lamp : romantic theory and the critical tradition by
M. H. Abrams
1953
Dante's drama of the mind : a modern reading of the Purgatorio by
Francis Fergusson
1952
The Victorian temper, a study in literary culture by Jerome
Hamilton Buckley
1951
Studies in seventeenth-century poetic by Ruth Wallerstein