Education & Training
- PhD, German, Princeton University, 1997
Representative Publications
Colloquia Germanica (Vol. 52.1-2, 2020), Special Double-Issue: “Theodor Fontane at 200”, Co-edited with Brian Tucker.
Fontane in the Twenty-First Century. Co-Edited with Brian Tucker. (May 2019, Camden House)
[Reviewed in German Quarterly (93.2, 2020)]
“Nordic Orientalism: Imagination and Power in Unwiederbringlich,” In Colloquia Germanica (52.1-2, 2020), 187-205.
Laura Deiulio and John B. Lyon, eds. Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture. Literary Joint Ventures, 1750 -1850 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)
“Introduction: The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit,” Co-Authored with Elliott Schreiber. Goethe Yearbook 24 (Spring 2017): 3-19.
“Disorientation and the Subterranean in Novalis.” Goethe Yearbook 24 (Spring 2017): 85-103.
"Space and Place in Goethe's 'Alexis und Dora.'" Goethe Yearbook 21 (Spring 2013): 23-38.
Out of Place. German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2013)
"'Ach!': Kleist's Unsettled Endings and Benjaminian Allegory." in Heinrich von Kleist - Style and Concept: Explorations in Literary Dissonance. De Gruyter, 2013.
"Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and the Crisis of Masculinity." The Germanic Review 83.2 (Spring 2008): 167-188. Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 222. Kathy D. Darrow, Project Editor. 285-294. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2010
"The Science of Sciences:’ Replication and Reproduction in Lavater’s Physiognomics.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (Winter, 2007): 257-277.
Crafting Flesh, Crafting Self: Violence and Identity in Early 19th-Century German Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2006)
Research Interests
John B. Lyon's research interests include German literature, philosophy and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his book, Crafting Flesh, Crafting the Self: Violence and Identity in Early 19th Century German Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2006), he analyzes wounded human bodies in early nineteenth-century German literature and traces their connection to changing philosophical models of the self.
His most recent book, Out of Place. German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2013), reads the literature of German Realism (Raabe, Keller, and Fontane) in terms of philosophical conceptions of place, specifically as a reaction to the changing sense of place resulting from the rise of capitalism, industrialism, and the metropolis during the nineteenth century.
He has published articles on German Realism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Büchner, Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Caspar Lavater, Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schiller and presented widely on topics in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, culture, and philosophy.