Jane Chance (born 1945), also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and
J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at
Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the
Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished
Professor Emerita in English.
She taught at the
University of Saskatchewan and then moved to Rice University in 1973 to teach
Old English literature; she was the first woman appointed to a
tenure-track position in the English department there.[2][3] She was appointed to the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in 2008 and became emerita upon her retirement in 2011.[1][2] She is founder president of the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages.[3]
At Rice, Chance established what became the Medieval Studies Program; she headed the first Women's Studies program within the English department, which was nationally noted.[3] In the late 1980s she was the first president of the Rice Commission on Women.[2][3][4] She unsuccessfully sued the university for gender discrimination in 1988.[5][6][7] In 1995 she established and funded the Julia Mile Chance Prize for Excellence in Teaching, named for her mother, to honor women faculty members.[3]
Comparative literature and medievalism
As Jane Chance Nitzsche, Chance published a revised version of her dissertation as The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in 1975.[8] Beginning in 1994, she published a three-volume history of medieval
mythography. Volume 1, From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177, was termed "monumental" and "highly detailed" by Sarah Stanbury in Arthuriana who nonetheless found the focus on gender poorly supported;[9] although the reviewer in Speculum called it "disappointing";[3][10] Volume 2, From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177–1350, was called "immensely learned and ambitious" in the same journal in 2002.[11] The final volume, The Emergence of Italian Humanism, 1321–1475, appeared in 2015, and was judged by one reviewer to be less comprehensive than claimed.[12] In 1995 she also published Mythographic Chaucer: the Fabulation of Sexual Politics.[2][13]
Other works in which Chance focuses on medieval women and gender studies include Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (1986),[14] which investigated, among other things, the concept of women as
peace-weavers[15] and their frequent failure,[16] and The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (2007);[17] she edited Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (1996)[18] and Women Medievalists and the Academy (2005), which
Helen Damico, writing in JEGP, called "massive in size and major in significance".[19]
Chance is a leading
Tolkien scholar.[20] Her books in this field include Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' (1979; revised edition 2001),[21]The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (1992; revised edition 2001), in which she uses the theoretical framework of
Michel Foucault,[22][23]Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader (2004),[24] and Tolkien, Self and Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016), a biography with literary analysis.[25]
^
abcdef"Jane Chance". Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Rice University. Archived from
the original on December 21, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2016.
^D. W. Robertson Jr. (Summer 1976). "Review: The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages by Jane Chance Nitzsche". Comparative Literature. 28 (3: Contemporary Criticism: Theory and Practice): 288.
doi:
10.2307/1769227.
JSTOR1769227.
^Winthrop Wetherbee (January 1997). "Review: Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177, by Jane Chance". Speculum. 72 (1): 125–27.
doi:
10.2307/2865880.
JSTOR2865880.
^John Block Friedman (October 2002). "Review: Medieval Mythography, 2: From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177–1350 by Jane Chance". Speculum. 77 (4): 1254–57.
doi:
10.2307/3301233.
JSTOR3301233.
^Hope Weissman (January 1988). "Review: Woman as Hero in Old English Literature by Jane Chance". Speculum. 63 (1): 134–36.
doi:
10.2307/2854337.
JSTOR2854337.
^Edward R. Haymes (Spring 1980). "Review: Tolkien's Art: A 'Mythology for England' by Jane Chance Nitzsche". The South Central Bulletin. 40 (1): 23–24.
doi:
10.2307/3187842.
JSTOR3187842.
^Robert Boenig (Spring 1993). "Review: The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power by Jane Chance". South Central Review. 10 (1): 102–03.
doi:
10.2307/3190291.
JSTOR3190291.
^Daniel J. Smitherman (2003). "Revised Editions of Tolkien Scholarship". Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 57 (1): 109–11.
doi:
10.2307/1348047.
JSTOR1348047.
S2CID162473169.
^Anthony B. Buccitelli (Summer 2006). "Review: Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader by Jane Chance". Western Folklore. 65 (3): 343–45.
JSTOR25474798.