Lilian R. Furst

Lilian Renée Furst (30 June 1931 – 11 September 2009) was a British-American literary scholar. A refugee from Nazi Germany's Anschluss, she studied in Europe and later headed Queen's University Belfast's comparative literary studies department, before becoming the Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A 1982 Guggenheim Fellow, she wrote or edited more than a dozen books, as well as a memoir about her youth. Biography Lilian Renée Furst, a Jew, was born on 30 June 1931 in Vienna.

In addition to brief studies at the University of Paris and University of Zurich, Furst obtained a BA with honours (1952) in French and German at the Victoria University of Manchester, as well as a PhD in German (1957) at the University of Cambridge. as well as Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at UNC. she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship "for a study of irony in the 18th and 19th century European narrative". She also served as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at UNC starting in 1984. She also wrote another manuscript which had not been published prior to her death;

Furst died from heart disease on 11 September 2009, in her Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home, aged 78. During her retirement, she had suffered from macular degeneration and retinal detachment, which had caused her to be unable to read, but received home care (including from close friends) during her last moments of her life. Romanticism in Perspective (1970) Counterparts: The Dynamics of Franco-German Literary Relationships, 1770-1895 (1977) The Contours of European Romanticism (1979) European Romanticism: Self-Definition (1980, ed.) Fictions of Romantic Irony (1984) L'Assommoir: A Working Woman's Life (1990) Disorderly Eaters: Text in Self-Empowerment (1992; ed. with Peter W. Graham) Realism (1992, ed.) Through the Lens of the Reader: Explorations of European Narrative (1992) Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (1997; ed.) All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (1995) Between Doctors and Patients: The Changing Balance of Power (1998) Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (2000, ed.) Before Freud: Hysteria and Hypothesis in Later Nineteenth-Century Psychiatric Cases (2005)