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Lilian R. Furst, Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature, emerita, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, died at her home in Chapel Hill on September 11, 2009.
Lilian taught at Chapel Hill from 1986 to 2005 and for many of those years regularly attended and read papers at the annual meetings of the scla and was an enthusiastic supporter of the organization. When I became chair of Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill in 1994, she encouraged me to attend the fall meeting in Raleigh and become involved with the organization, praising it for the quality of the papers presented and the colkgiality of the people attending. The scla meeting was high on her list of conferences that she encouraged our graduate students to attend because she thought it was conference where they would get encouragement and positive feedback. Travel money for students in Comparative Literature, however, had been scarce, and when a few years into my chairmanship a former doctoral student of hers anonymously started donating $3500 a year as the "Lilian Furst Fund" for her to spend as she pleased, she, with her usual concern for the students, directed me to divide it into seven annual $500 travel scholarships so that students could more easily attend conferences.
She was the author or editor of twenty-three books, at least 106 articles (none of which, so far as I know, were repeated in the books), and over 80 reviews. She wrote major studies of Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, irony, and narrative technique, and, in later years, she became a leading figure in the emerging field of literature and medicine. One of her books, Romanticism...