This book, originally to be titled Dr. Johnson’s Autopsy began with my curiosity about why the exemplary eighteenthcentury Englishman of letters was dissected, probably against his living will. While it has led me down many unexpected paths, that curiosity remains unsatisfied; it has resulted, instead, in my recognition—and profession—of love, both the love of literature and the love of Johnson, of which the autopsy was a complex and conflicted expression. In its service, I want in the rest of this introduction to consider not the anecdotal form in which Johnson endures but rather the material remains of Samuel Johnson’s autopsy and my own and others’ ongoing search for them. That autoptic desire to see the thing itself, a seeing by oneself and of oneself (as the word’s etymology indicates) is not, as it turns out, so different from the familiar introductory impulse to focus upon an anecdote, since Johnson’s selected remains, claimed by the surgeons and carefully preserved as “preparations,” have yet to be found. One of the many functions of the anecdote—like the anatomical preparation, the result of a personal selection and preservation process—is to stand in for the lost body.

This dissertation investigates the trope of the na�ve protagonist in the British novel from 1770 – 1830 and its many narrative uses, ranging from feminist satire in Frances Burney’s novels to masculine-coded novels about imperialism such as Waverley. I argue for a reading practice that is more aware of na�vet� and its active formal novelistic qualities. Na�vet� is not simply a state of not knowing or lack, a tabula rasa that must be corrected through experience; instead, protagonists’ na�vet� functions meaningfully to ironize, critique, unveil, and uphold state power in turns. Just as knowledge is a form of power, na�vet� has a complex and active role in shaping power. In the chapters that follow, I argue that these protagonists’ lack of knowledge actively influences novelistic form and becomes a scholarly problematic. I begin with Frances Burney’s first three novels, Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in which na�vet� is a vehicle for feminist satire against violent masculinity and the patriarchy that works to keep women ignorant. In my second chapter, I investigate how na�vet� operates in two Gothic novels produced in the 1790s: William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (completed 1798-1799). I argue that for the disenfranchised and disadvantaged protagonists of these novels, na�vet� is the epistemological tool that leads them to discover systems of oppression that work to keep them ignorant, but stops just short of revolution. In the third chapter, I argue that na�vet� is an important trope in the national tale, used to absolve English subjects of acts of imperialism, and I do so by close reading three novels: Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), Walter Scott’s Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). Finally, in chapter four, I examine the powerlessness of knowledge systems in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic tale, The Last Man (1826), which posits that, in the face of the apocalypse and the collapse of the British Empire, na�vet�—an admission of unknowing—may be the only viable epistemology for the English subject.

“The Pathologies of Flesh: Temporalities of Feminine Embodiment in Contemporary Poetry” examines contemporary American poetry which considers the relationship between illness and time. The experience of illness instigates a breakdown of linear chronology, and the poets I analyze use these ruptures as a means to depict the ambiguities of illness. I draw from recent scholarship on time and the body in queer studies and disability studies in order to explore the various “times” of illness: the moments of duration, onset, prognosis, and treatment that subvert the temporal narratives of the “healthy” body. “The Pathologies of Flesh” argues that illness functions in the “gaps” of time, rather than unfolding linearly; poetry thus functions as a form of disruption, offering the writer a space of respite from these breaks in time. In acknowledging these temporal breaks, poetry opens up the possibility of approaching other alternative experiences of time—as the chapters explore—from the slow violence of environmental disaster to the accelerated crisis of police brutality.

The project examines poetry from the early twentieth century through the present, including canonical figures such as Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. The heart of the project reads the work of a group of women writing at the close of the twentieth century and into the next: Elizabeth Arnold, Claudia Rankine, Bhanu Kapil, Danielle Pafunda, Jillian Weise, and Anne Boyer, and the late poets Hillary Gravendyk and C.D. Wright. “The Pathologies of Flesh” argues that the temporal ruptures experienced within illness relate to other kinds of rupture, such as social marginalization, spatial movement, and the aggressive, abrupt ruptures of violent action. In considering a wide variety of illnesses—including cancers, chronic illnesses, and mental illnesses—the chapters draw connections between the disruptions found in geological spaces, in labor and compensation, in racial conflict, and in the documentation of death. Poetry thus makes a compelling intervention in teleological narrative structures, offering a space—linguistically and on the page itself—to examine ruptures in time and their effect on the body.

Before, during, and after the long Romantic era, Europe experimented with new technological modes of measuring and telling time with clock and calendar: Thomas Tompion, the “Father of English Watchmaking,” manufactured thousands of timepieces in the 1700s, Britain erased eleven days from the calendar in the 1750s, France turned back the hands of time to Year One in the 1790s, and the British Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time in the 1840s. At the same moment, English poets from a broad range of backgrounds were developing new poetic strategies of anachronism (in its literal, etymological sense of “against time”) to contest the increasing dominance of what I call “imperial time”: the new clock-based, machine-regulated, and strictly standardized temporality used to enforce a forward-moving narrative of empire. My research highlights the central role of poetry in asserting a new chronopolitics that enacts powerfully untimely rhythms in order to reform entrenched cultural and economic institutions.

Historical and historicist works from the eighteenth century to the present portray anachronism as the sign of error and backwardness. “After Time” alternatively argues that intentional anachronism is neither the emblem of indefensible inaccuracy nor the mark of cultural primitivism. Rather than opposing anachronism to history, my dissertation historicizes anachronism. Revising instead of abandoning history, the poems of Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Benger, Joanna Southcott, and Lucy Aikin build alternative feminist traditions out of the new imperialist teleologies that tied tropes of chronological progress to the Garden of Eden and the feminization of culture. By comparison, both new transatlantic anthologies of fugitive pieces and the more urbane occasional verses of Horace Walpole and Lord Byron defy this new time program by variously relating ephemeral scraps and fading inks to a series of fleeting figures: juvenile poetasters, fugitive slaves, and queer cosmopolitans. The works of William Wordsworth and John Clare, by contrast, connect an increasingly obsolete sense of local, agrarian time with circular and belated lyric temporalities. Finally, the epics and odes of William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley move after time—beyond anachronism and toward timelessness—in order to explore the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of eternity. Taken together, these writers offer us new ways of understanding the power of poetic form to reshape time’s binds.

This dissertation analyzes memoirs written by parents of children with disabilities, a subgenre of “special needs” memoirs. Using tools of narrative analysis and feminist interpretive methods, I contextualize my analyses to the social, political, and economic conditions that enable, or limit, recognition of non-normative identities and embodiments. I demonstrate that the figure of the disabled child uniquely articulates how gender, heterosexuality, and typical ability are mutually constituted, and significantly, how the life stages of childhood and adulthood are not only relational, but made intelligible by developmental paradigms that assume heteronormative-ability. In the absence of typical ability, heteronormativity is a narrative device that causes disabled children to “overcome” their disabilities and achieve a “normal” childhood (and future normal adulthood). I organize “special needs” memoirs according to three narrative registers: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the disruptive. My analyses show how these narrative templates, which intend to be recuperative and to promote inclusion, inscribe disabled children into a normative life course overdetermined by limited narratives of progress, individualism, and autonomy. I demonstrate that the subgenre of parenting memoirs as a whole, as well as the narrative templates that dominate it, align with neoliberalism’s mandates for self-improvement and to make a project of one’s life.

This project contends with an understudied literary genre: the alternate history novel. I attempt to delineate the boundaries of this literary category as scholars have come to understand them, and then push on its parameters to include works that we might not have thought to consider. I look at the alternate history as a literary form that attends to the relation between history and trauma in its various constitutions. Novels of alternate history tend to focus on the aftermath of catastrophic historical traumas, and attune themselves to the ways that such big traumatic histories beget very ordinary, individual traumas that structure and condition subjectivity. These novels understand trauma much as Cathy Caruth does, as “not so much a symptom of the unconscious,” but as “a symptom of history.” In Chapter One, I look at Philip K. Dick’s paradigmatic example of the form, The Man in the High Castle, attending to its interest in the cultural status of the alternate history as a literary genre, and its correlative emphasis on reading and writing as interpretive acts that beget alternate histories and multiple worlds. Chapter Two engages Philip Roth’s counterfactual sensibility, not only by looking at his very straightforward alternate history, The Plot Against America, but by looking at his early work on Anne Frank, and at a 1972 draft of American Pastoral, housed at the Library of Congress, that centers on an alternate history for this singular historical figure. In Chapter Three, I read Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a variant of the alternate history, with all the particular ways that the genre interrogates not only our ideas about history and historical narrative or historical representation, but also how we think about and relate to the narratives that govern our own present moment. Ultimately, I argue that alternate histories, with their peculiar derangements of time and knowledge, foreground the power of narrative not only in constructing our sense of history (be it personal or collective), but also in constituting our sense of ourselves as subjects in history. They show us that history isn’t in the past; it’s an unfolding of days, a present moment to be interpreted later on, an unknowable, conditioning, durational force. They offer up ruptured histories, fractured narratives as a means and a mode of contending with the “master narratives” that still have us in their grip. They remind us that we are the stories we tell.

Romantic-period authors, reviewers, and critics persistently invoked sodomy and cannibalism when criticizing literary ‘perversions,’ the most significant of which was plagiarism. This dissertation accounts for this cluster of associations and elucidates their meaning for the histories of sexuality and authorship more broadly. First, I trace how critical discourse in the Romantic period projected older anxieties about sodomy and other kinds of ‘perverse incorporations’ onto authorship. Second, I contend that features of late eighteenth-century authorship actually prefigure structures integral to modern sexuality. In the eighteenth century, Britons and Americans used authorship as a primary concept with which to articulate the relationships between subjects, between a subject and the public, and between a subject and the law. By the end of the nineteenth century, heterosexuality had taken precedence as the defining feature of subjectivity in these relationships. Over the course of the Romantic period, authorship underwent a ‘straightening’ that paradoxically involved the incorporation and assimilation of the very textual and corporeal perversions—particularly plagiarism, cannibalism, and sodomy—against which normative authorship, and normative masculinity, continued to be defined. This project thus makes two broader claims: it argues that incorporation and subsequent disavowal form the basis by which modern masculine subjects define themselves, and it describes and analyzes the incorporative structure of perversion in modern Anglo-British culture more generally. This project focuses on the work and reception of authors with uneasy or contested relationships to their source texts, and whose own sexual sensibilities were richly unconventional: Thomas Gray, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Brockden Brown. These figures are instructive not because their work reveals some essential ‘gayness’ or ‘queerness,’ but because their blackmailability (in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known formulation) both as men and as authors allows us to see more clearly the logic underlying masculine sexuality and authorship in the period more generally.