Professor Richard Maxwell: Literary scholar devoted to the strangeness and excitement of the urban experience

(TIMOTHY HYMAN)

An American scholar with an intensely imaginative response to British literature, Richard Maxwell devoted much of his energy to conveying the excitement and strangeness of urban experience. In his first book, The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992), he stakes out part of his territory: the contrary visions of labyrinth and panorama, in Eugène Sue as well as in Hugo, in GM Reynolds as well as in Dickens – and including even a chapter on the great city-etcher Charles Meryon, whose sober Paris topographies are invaded by floating phantasms.

Maxwell's voracious reading in several languages, his unquenchable appetite for both fiction and history, made for a scope far wider than most of his contemporaries could encompass. At a time when comparative literature seemed to be disappearing from British universities, Maxwell (sometimes in tandem with his wife, Katie Trumpener) was introducing Yale students to a view of the world where cross-cultural collisions of all kinds – illustration and film, high and low, 17th and 20th centuries – were inescapable.

Born in 1948, he grew up mostly in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades. As an undergraduate at Riverside, Maxwell was editor of the campus newspaper, at one point suppressed by the Reaganite authorities; he went into hiding while surreptitiously printing and distributing the paper, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. He would remain a libertarian.

He moved on to Chicago for his PhD, and then settled quietly in the small university town of Valparaiso, Indiana. By the time I came to know him in the 1990s, Maxwell lived alone in a beautiful but dishevelled neo-classical house, set in a carefully tended garden. He'd passed through two marriages, but The Mysteries of Paris and London is a work of the solitary imagination: a soliloquy opening into melancholy, "the realm where bits and pieces of everything are mingled and where modernity emerges from a vision of history in ruins."

Editing the Penguin Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities (2000), and publishing numerous articles on Walter Scott, belonged to the more mainstream side of Maxwell's output. Earlier, at Chicago, he'd been introduced by Jerome McGann to the eccentric work of the British writer John Cowper Powys, whose best-known novels were written in America in the 1930s. Powys would become a major focus, and his late panoramic romance,Porius, would provide the conclusion to Maxwell's last published book, The Historical Novel in Europe (2009). Maxwell helped set up a Powys Society of North America, serving as brilliant editor of Powys Notes; he became a regular visitor to the annual conferences held by the British Powys Society and in 2008 was appointed editor of their Powys Journal.

In 1991 he met a younger scholar at the University of Chicago, Katie Trumpener; they shared a passionate interest in Scott and the cinema of Jacques Rivette. They married in 1997, dividing their lives between Valparaiso and Chicago, until in 2002 they took up posts at Yale and set up house together in a huge, book-lined mansion in Chapel Street. Their son Alexander had been born in 1998; his precocious reading may have developed their engagement with children's literature.

Richard edited The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002) with Katie writing on "City Scenes", and they collaborated as co-editors of The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (2008). They enjoyed a fellowship of several months at the American Academy in Berlin; they helped set up an international conference on The Panorama at New Haven's British Art Center; they had a sabbatical year together in California, and also spent some time in Japan. Their travels, their reading, their domestic and university lives were documented with irony in Maxwell's email journal, The Mysteries of New Haven, much of which deserves to be published.

This flowering was suddenly, cruelly blighted when, late in 2009, Maxwell suffered a seizure and was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Through all the months of treatment and gradual loss of function, Maxwell continued to be productive. Most surprisingly, his arms paralysed, he dictated a lucid novella, The Demonstration House (about a Soviet delegation visiting Leon Feuchtwanger in 1950s California).

The public reading of this at Yale in March, by an assembled group of friends and family, with Maxwell present, he saw as a leave-taking. Among several other texts for posthumous publication, his book on The Panorama is especially keenly awaited.

Despite moments of anguish, Maxwell kept his wry humour. Learning that his father and Nick, his son by his second marriage, were both arriving in New Haven, he nodded. "A Victorian deathbed," he said.

A memorial meeting will be held at Yale on 18 October.

Richard Maxwell, literary scholar, born 15 October 1948: professor of English, Valparaiso University; senior lectureir in comparative literature, Yale University; married three times (two sons); died New Haven 20 July 2010.