Banning the Enlightenment
In the latest horrible news, book bans are coming back into fashion—a Cold War relic, now de rigeur for...
I Am Elinor Dashwood
During the last class meeting of my Jane Austen seminar, the students and I took an internet quiz to...
On Never Letting the Novel Go
When I was in high school, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It was making...
Romancing the Stallion
Recently I had occasion to ask: did Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion (1941) set me up for life as...
Dear Mrs. Cleary
When Beverly Cleary died at age 104 in 2021, most tributes to this beloved writer focused on just one...
I Capture Cassandra
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I read this line from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle...
The Reader as a Work-in-Progress
My mother and father (directly and indirectly) introduced me to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. My father moved to...
The Work of Remembering: An Interview with Devoney Looser
Devoney Looser’s acclaimed Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës came...
Our Flag Means Fop
David Jenkins has explained that the inspiration for his hit television show Our Flag Means Death, which has just...
Sea Glass Shadows
One day, knowing how much you love the beach and cats, our mom will find a book that happens...
Two Fools, Among Others
It started with Jack Kerouac, unfortunately. I was a performatively masculine seventeen-year-old, like most people reading Kerouac, and I...
A to Zikaron: Re(t)reading Animalia
“An Armored Armadillo Avoiding An Angry Alligator:” so begins Graeme Base’s 1986 alphabet book Animalia, a menagerie of animals,...
Dear American Girl, I am Getting Top Surgery
Your body is talking to you. Can you hear it? Learn to tune in to your body and hear...
Parenting and Perspective
My daughter is in the first grade, and her teacher gives her a packet of homework for the week...
Edmund
I always liked Aslan a little better than Jesus. The Christ of the Bible could be rather erratic—a trait...
Golden Hours
I lost reading along the way growing up, shedding the stripes that had marked a bookish boyhood. The fad...
The Life That is Waiting For Us
The first time anyone asked me what I thought of A Room with a View, I said, “sure, it’s...
The Corrosive Sublime
Towards the end of the barricade sequence in Les Misérables, Victor Hugo remarks, Victory, when in accord with progress,...
Living to Work in Severance
I’ve been laid off twice in my life. In the leadup to each, workplace conversations converged on a single...
Richard Powers’s Romanticism
In his Booker Prize-nominated 2021 novel Bewilderment, Richard Powers tells the story of Robin, a nine-year-old boy struggling to...
An Ode to the Haircut
How incredibly lucky one must be to get a haircut more than two even three times a year. Once...
The Gravity and Levity of How To with John Wilson
At least once a day, I stare at two of my most cherished possessions—a half-used can of Barbasol and...
Flashes of Light
The night before my youngest daughter was born in August 2020, I finished a round of revisions on my...
Love Among the Pods; Or, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Textual Intercourse
the only chance for happiness in this disastrous world … –Mary Wollstonecraft There’s a moment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s final,...
Fantasy Friends
To write, and to write about stuff that mattered to me, even if it strikes some as silly or...
“To Temper Wit with Morality”: The Comforting Moral Fantasy of Instagram’s Celebrity Gossip Account, Deuxmoi
I spend a lot of time thinking about Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore and the fact that their babies...
Coconut Music: An Essay by My Imposter Syndrome
One of the TikTok idioms that the youths say these days is that so-and-so has “main-character energy.” Or they...
My Dark Continent (A Book Report)
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed...
What We Drink in the Shadows
To say Gothic imagery has permeated popular culture is to say nothing particularly groundbreaking. There isn’t a mall in...
On Charlotte Lucas and Terrible Gold Diggers Like Myself
Charlotte Lucas is one of the most tragic and realistic fictional characters in the Western canon. She is a...
Sounds Like the Long Eighteenth Century
A few minutes into a screening of The Favourite (2018), my partner half turned to me in the theater...
Rachel Cusk’s Art of Conversation
After my second vaccination in 2021, dreams of life after COVID-19 began to find a foothold. First on my...
Disinformation in Excess; or, the Fatal Conspiracy
Those of us who study the long eighteenth century sometimes jokingly suggest that it has never ended. It is...
The Lamb and the Woolf
In the middle of Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy’s edited collection On Essays is a typo so felicitous, so pleasurable, that...
A Journal of Keeping Up
This year I hope to learn diligence. Often, at the start of a semester, I transcribe a line by...
Prose Couplets—The Argument
Paul Hunter’s work, a mighty store and true Leaves plenty for we lesser souls to rue: That we might...
The Body, Otherwise
On February 4, 2020, my breasts were surgically removed via bilateral mastectomy. This was my fourth surgery in three...
Art, Porn, and the Post-Pandemic Museum
Pornhub’s new venture Classic Nudes challenges art’s hierarchies by focusing on and recreating its most erotic moments through pornography....
The Consent of the Governed
Charlotte Temple should have known better. She should have listened to her teachers and her parents. She should not...
The Classroom as Monument
In the first weeks of a Fall 2019 class on U.S. Literature and the Law, my students and I...
Accommodating Women: Re-reading “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in My Kitchen
So I will let it alone, and write about the house. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” I...
First Loves and Bad Fantasy: Re-reading David Eddings
My father’s library took up most of his office and much of our living room–hundreds or thousands of books...
Veronica Litt’s Playlist of 10 #c18 Music Videos
I love pop music. I love the eighteenth century. When these things collide, I am in heaven. Ascend with...
Bedtime Stories
Your duvet, flung with stars, lies horizontal on the bed, the soft parts gathered in the bottom corner, like...
The Loves of Heavy Metal: Baroness & Radical Feminist Botany
I’ve spent the last decade or so of my life writing a book about women and plants–specifically, eighteenth-century British...
“Nothing of Body:” Our Clarissa Quarantine
A young woman of eighteen, an over-achiever, her parents’ youngest child and not-so-secret favorite, returns home from an extended...
Vile Encroacher
This odd phrase, “vile encroacher,” is one of Clarissa’s favorite epithets for her antagonist, Lovelace. She uses the phrase...
Promises, Promises
“Promises Made, Promises Kept.” So ran President Trump’s campaign slogan before the pandemic underlined, as if it needed underlining,...
Watching the Detectives
The experience of pandemic and quarantine is, for me, an experience of increased surveillance and monitoring. I now spend...
Clarissa; Or, the History of a Fact-Checker
In one of Clarissa’s most harrowing episodes, the heroine escapes from Lovelace’s imprisonment and manages to hide in anonymity...
The History of a Young Lady?
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady balances contradictory claims on the fulcrum of its “or.”...
Clarissa’s Curse
Among the many disappointed fathers in English literature, James Harlowe and King Lear may not seem to have much...
Clarissa’s Allegories of Trauma
There is a strange moment in Samuel Richardson’s novel when Clarissa deceives someone for the first time in her...
Rereading Clarissa, March 28, 2021
“Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.” Joan Didion, Blue Nights...
Clarissa in the Streets
A few summers ago, I was rambling through Hackney, near Regent’s Canal, and found myself surrounded by streets named...
Prison Sentences
“Prison Sentences” is a pandemic prose poem consisting of lines, words, and sentences cut from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa...
On Meeting Susan Howe
My journal entry from August 21, 2020 begins: “And on this penultimate Clarissa Zoom meeting (after most of us...
Jonathan and Taylor: The Two Swifts
I’ll confess that I’ve avoided writing a piece like this for a long time. I was afraid a reading...
One Loose and Tenuous Thread: Reading Bridgerton with Lukács
Art always says “And yet!” to life. ~Georg Lukács I’m late to the conversation about Bridgerton—specifically, about its counterfactual...
A Call for Corsets!
In June 2011, almost a decade ago now, I received an email with the tantalizing subject line—“A Call for...
The Problem of Fashionable Abolition: Performative Allyship Then and Now
I am filled with the most intense dread when I imagine anyone Googling my name. Now I know what...
We are Seven
Now it is down to six, or rather we are seven: six poets and one bachelorette. She is the...
The Importance of Being Earnest
“I do” is a performative speech act. You say it in the midst of a marriage ceremony and then...
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Frozen
Little in my life prepared me for parenthood. I was not raised with a soft spot for children. My...
Trump, Biden, and the Bloody American Dream
When the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden wanted to celebrate the English King Charles II’s ascent to the throne in...
Love Under These Conditions
I once heard Blakey Vermeule, a scholar I admire, describe the challenge of breaking students out of their passion...
Death Poetry During a Pandemic
I teach poetry—not writing poetry but reading it. Students in my class start with a study of sound and...
On Not Swimming
First Lap The pools were all closed in the summer of 2020, because of the pandemic. I missed them...
Librarian, Read Thyself
“Why would you enter a dying field?” “You need a master’s degree to shelve books?” “Must be nice to...
Lady Credit and the 2008 Crisis Film
In 2020, with another financial crisis looming on the horizon, the US culture industry has appropriately mythologized the 2008...
Wind, Light
If a photograph is like a time capsule, a tribute that one pays in the present to the future,...
The Sentimental Media Event
…restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what...
Old Age and the Landscapes of Memory: Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent
The poet, novelist, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was not yet forty when she wrote her novel, All Passion Spent, published...
Journal-Writing in the Time of Corona
By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it...
Dave Chappelle and Friends: Race, Remembrance, and Recovery
A deep swab of the nostril is rarely an auspicious beginning to a fun night out. But in the era of COVID-19, this particular...
The Future of the Eighteenth Century
The face of London is now indeed strangely altered. Since March, its residents (along with most of the rest...
Our Scholarly Future
(Or, SEL’s Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century) Because of my recent experience with a second Studies...
This Ship We’re In
In Fall 2019, I spoke at a workshop in my department on “Decolonization in the Classroom,” where I was...
What Kind of Future are We Making?
Last fall at my home institution SUNY Buffalo, amidst a crisis in college-wide decisions about graduate education, two of...
A History of the New Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century has always been new. Ab ovo, Tristram Shandy might say: right from the egg. Even when...
Snapshots of a Disappearing Field
This is no time to mince words. The state of French eighteenth-century studies is so dire that I have...
The Shape of Things to Come
(Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Community College) When I attended the “Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Future of the Profession” panel...
We Must Keep Moving
When Jonathan Sachs asked me to participate in this round table, I immediately accepted. What could be more important...
Another B+ Coronavirus Essay
As I write this, it’s Blursday in the United States. (Thanks to playwright Kate Hamill for sharing the name...
The Old Normal
I miss the quiet pock … pock that used to come from the tennis courts over the back. People...
Poetry and the Precision of Bread
First turn William Cowper spends most of the first book of his erratic long-form poem The Task (1785) walking...
Salience and Silence on the Screen in the Time of COVID-19
1 Like many people who aren’t essential frontline workers, I am watching TV to save myself and to save...
Feelings and Shit
My father was recently rushed to the hospital with abdominal pain and underwent emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage....
A.P. Bio is the Sitcom Higher Ed Needs
Netflix’s announcement of the upcoming series The Chair, starring Sandra Oh as the chair of an English department, was...
Reissued
I can’t tell you the amount of people who want me to write articles about ageing. Really? Guy at...
Pure Heroine
“You speak like a heroine,” Montoni said contemptuously. “Let us see if you can suffer like one.” –Ann Radcliffe,...
I Interviewed My 16-Year Old Son About the Pandemic
On April 1, 2020, I interviewed my sixteen-year old son, Adrian, about the coronavirus. Below is an edited and...
Terpsichorean Powers
My first word was “tlo.” You know, “tlo.” It meant “cat,” my Mum would tell me, proudly. “How did...
Flirting with Foucault
In the spring of 1975, Simeon Wade, a struggling junior faculty member at Claremont Graduate University, wrote a letter...
Learning to Drive in Yorkshire
Four years ago, I moved from the southern United States to northern England. I thought the main adjustment would...
Fighting Loving, Loving Fighting
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. ~ Rilke March 6th...
Saint Valentine of the Planetarium
The projector kicks on. Saint Valentine smears the cosmos across the dome as lovers lean into one another. You...
Check out our 2019 Valentine’s Day Issue
Crystal B. Lake, Love, Labor, Loss J. Brendan Shaw, Drinking Tea Alone with Friends Kathleen Tamayo Alves, Psycho (But...
All for Love
When I was sixteen years old and on vacation at my uncle’s home in western India, my summer friend...
Two Poems
An Ode to Broken Hammers Two Decades Before His Arrest, Ezra Pound...
I Don’t Read (The Right Books)
I used to have this image in my head of the perfect English major. This person had somehow managed...
Reading Together
About a year ago, my twin sister moved to Pennsylvania to pursue her PhD in Physics. For twenty-two years,...
A Scarlett Letter
On April 11, 2019, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed Bill No. 23, The Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act...
Ye Olde Enthusiasm
One of the many items of contention in my parents’ long custody battle was my overdue library books. It’s...
How the Sciences Hurt
Ever since I was a child, I knew I wanted to spend my life helping others. When I was...
Do What You Love! (Or, Don’t)
At the end of my undergraduate degree, I faced a lot of choices as to which graduate programs I...
Trumpstram Shandy: The Inhumanity of Celebrity
It’s startling to run into a celebrity. My wife and I were walking around Central Park one afternoon when...
Introduction
In her now-classic 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin...
Circa 198X: Superpose, Science Fiction Histories, and the Trans Child
Decades are slipping together in the town of Port City. 1980 breaching the surface of 1970. On a day...
Reading Histories of the Transgender Child from the Transmasculine Borderlands
Gender theories reveal our attachments to certain ways of seeing and being in the world. In many cases, our...
Listening/Loving/Liking
“Nothing’s without obliquity, pain itself is not, language about pain least of all, but the shame itself of privacy...
What Does the Trans Child Offer to Childhood and Youth Studies?
The media frequently suggests that the existence of young trans people is a new phenomenon. This libel about trans...
Poetics of Gender Self-Determination
Children are metaphors, Jules Gill-Peterson contends in Histories of the Transgender Child. In the nineteenth century, amid rapid transformations...
Conserving Trans Life
I come to Gill-Peterson’s timely piece of trans scholarship as a teacher of medical humanities and disability studies. Histories...
Trans Innocence
Innocent does not mean virtuous. In the preface to Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson explains that innocence...
On Wanting Trans Women and Children (For Better or For Worse)
When I was a little boy, I can’t remember ever consciously thinking that I wanted to be a girl....
The Queer Kinship of Our Literary Lives: A Tribute to My Uncle Joe LeSueur (and Frank O’Hara)
As I write it’s Pride month, June 2019. This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall and with...
Tropical Landscape with Skaters
I may be the only person in Florida, or the southeast, or even the whole US, who researches eighteenth-century...
How Not to Know; Or, Hack Your Student Evals with this One Weird Trick
At some point between having children and my fortieth birthday, the excellent memory I was born with started to...
Twitter Accounts I’d Like to Make
Twitter offers clever people countless opportunities to be clever. This makes the platform both brilliant and frustrating. It’s where...
Jane Austen, On Sabbatical
“Solitary elegance”—the phrase, invoked in an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra, is quintessentially Jane Austen’s, but I’ve adopted...
Why the Brits Can’t Keep Calm and Carry On About the Royal Baby (Hint: It’s About Race)
The intimacy of motherhood shapes our idea of nationhood. When the black poet Nayyirah Waheed wrote, “my mother was...
Dickinson’s Luxury
In the years before I started grad school, I worked for a time at a French bakery on the...
Swikipedia
Erin Severson is an aspiring eighteenth-centuryist whose heart has always belonged to Jonathan Swift. She recently graduated from UCLA...
Tourists of Eden
When I told the customs officer at Heathrow that we were heading to the Lake District, it was an...
Leap
The word “leap” shows up repeatedly in sayings and clichés: leaps and bounds, leap of faith, leap for joy,...
T. H. White’s Anecdotal Eighteenth Century
Like many a child of the 80s, I grew up reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King...
Proposals, on Behalf of an Elective Global Canon
The canon in literature has typically been understood in two coordinated ways. The first is elective: What are the...
Boris Johnson is a Fictional Character
“Who does he think he is?” I heard a commuter grumble, as she stared, aghast, at yet another headline...
Pamela Weaponized
The final scene in Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela turns...
Nationalism and the Limits of Inquiry
Perhaps George Orwell was right when he wrote in Notes on Nationalism (1945)—one imagines his eyelids lowered and his...
Front Porch
Once I—with someone else (because you need someone else for such a thing)—once I transformed my front porch into...
Brightly Starred
Some say that Mary Shelley chose her only surviving child’s wife for him—a woman like herself a young widow...
The Novel in Two Parts
In her influential 2008 essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith aimed to steer novels away from lyrical...