Peter Preston Brooks (born 1938) is an American literary theorist who is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has been Professor in the Department of English and School of Law at the University of Virginia. Among his many accomplishments is the founding of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003. Brooks is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work cuts across French and English literature, law, and psychoanalysis. He was influenced by fellow Yale scholar, Paul de Man, to whom his book Reading for the Plot is dedicated. His 2022 book Seduced By Story was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in criticism.
Education
Brooks obtained his B.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1965) from Harvard University. He also studied at University College, London as a Marshall Scholar, and at the University of Paris.
Personal life
Brooks has five children. On July 18, 1959, Brooks married Margaret Elisabeth Waters. On May 12, 2001, Brooks married the law professor, author and commentator, Rosa Brooks. The couple later divorced.
Bibliography
Books
Non-fiction
The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (1969) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976), Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (1993), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (co-editor with Paul Gewirtz, 1996), Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (co-editor with Alex Woloch) (2000), Realist Vision (2005), Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), Enigmas of Identity (2011), Anthologie du mélodrame classique (with Myriam Faten Sfar, 2011), Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year (2017), Balzac's Lives (2020), Seduced by Story (2022),
Fiction
World Elsewhere (2000), The Emperor's Body (2010),