Caroline Levine (born December 12, 1970) is an American literary critic. She is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University.^[1] Her published works are in the fields of Victorian literature, literary theory, literary criticism, formalism, television, and climate change.

Born in Syracuse, New York, Levine received her AB in comparative literature from Princeton University in 1992. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from the Birkbeck, University of London, in 1996.^[2]

Levine assumed her position as David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University in 2016, and worked as the Picket Family Chair of the English Department from 2018 to 2021. Prior to her work at Cornell, Levine taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2002 to 2016, and worked as the chair of the English Department from 2013 to 2016. She held previous appointments in the English Department at Rutgers University–Camden (1998–2002) and Wake Forest University (1997–1998).^[3]

Levine has published four books: The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) won the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies. Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts appeared in 2007. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association and the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture. Flavorwire named Forms as one of the "10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015,"^[4] and the book was widely reviewed in venues such as PMLA,^[5] the Los Angeles Review of Books,^[6] the London Review of Books,^[7] and The Times Literary Supplement.^[8] The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023) has been excerpted^[9] and critiqued in The Chronicle of Higher Education.^[10]

Levine is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.^[11] She co-founded the Mellon World Literatures Workshop at the University of Wisconsin Madison^[12]

In addition to her scholarship, Levine is an activist and public intellectual working to address climate change and sustainability. She is member of TIAA-Divest and Citizens Climate Lobby and was a key leader in the successful effort to make Cornell University divest from fossil fuels.^[13]

The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003)^[14] connects narrative suspense to scientific experimentation. At the same moment that Victorian philosophers of science were arguing that rigorous scientists needed to suspend judgment (testing a hypothesis and waiting to see the results before asserting anything about the world, rather than just leaping to conclusions), novelists were structuring their plots around moments of suspense. Suspense is a narrative strategy of hinting and withholding, inviting readers to speculate about the truth, and so teaches audiences to behave like scientists: to wonder, hypothesize, and then wait for the truth. The Victorian novel — and suspense fiction ever since — helped to democratize and popularize the scientific method.

Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007)^[15] considers public controversies over art objects, including public art, copyright, propaganda, and obscenity. It argues that all of these cases revolve around the democratization of culture.

Levine's best-known book is Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network,^[16] which argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don’t impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of “affordances” from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Forms was the focus of a forum in PMLA in 2017.^[17]

The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023)^[18] argues that humanists have the tools to mobilize political power—and the responsibility to use those tools to avert the worst impacts of global warming. Building on the theory developed in Forms, Levine shows how formalist methods can be used in the fight for climate justice. The book ends with a workbook intended for students and other general readers: "Three Weeks to Political Action."^[19]

• 2004 Perkins Prize for the "best book in narrative studies" from the Narrative Society
• 2015 James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA
• 2016 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, Media Ecology Association

Books

• The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
• Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007. “Manifestos” series. Polish translation: Od prowokacji do demokracji. Czyli o tym, dlaczego potrzebna nam sztuka. Warsaw: Musa, 2013.
• Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015. Turkish translation: 2017. Korean translation, 2021.
• The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Anthologies

• Norton Anthology of World Literature: one of a team of co-editors, responsible for the nineteenth-century material. 2024

Edited Books

• From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola, collection of essays edited with Mark W. Turner. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998.
• Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: co-edited with Mario-Ortiz-Robles. Ohio State Univ. Press, 2011. Includes co-authored introduction. Paperback: 2015.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, new edition commissioned for the Norton Library series, 2021.

Edited Special Issues of Journals

• “Gender, Genre and George Eliot,” special issue edited with Mark W. Turner, Women’s Writing 3. With co-authored introduction: 95–96. 1996.
• “Reading for Pleasure: The Gender of Popular Genres,” special issue edited with Mark W. Turner, The Journal of Popular Culture 35: 1. With co-authored introduction: 1–4. 2001.
• “What Counts as World Literature?” special issue, edited with Bala Venkat Mani, MLQ 74:2 (June), with co-authored introduction. 2013
• “Television for Victorianists,” special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 63 (April), with introduction. 2013.

• Literary criticism
• Victorian literature

• Cornell Faculty Webpage