The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the simultaneous rise of two discourses that promised to explain the past and predict the future: probability and the novel. The two were not merely historically coincident. In dialogue from the start, “Probable Histories” argues that probability and the novel were also mutually constitutive. Drawing on standard histories of each, I summarize their respective “rises” in the eighteenth century and analyze their interdependence. I then turn to a series of case studies, investigating the novels of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy as points of intersection between the concerns of probability and those of the novel. The project reveals how these two modes of temporal projection extend and inform one another as modes of prediction. In so doing, “Probable Histories” offers a new account of the novel’s shared role in conceptualizing causation.

Reading Places: Local Landscapes and Imperial Culture in Romantic Britain examines a literary topos in which a subject reads a rural British place as a material record encoding a long and complex history. It asks how and why Romantic landscape descriptions register the influence of the burgeoning British Empire. I challenge longstanding critical tendencies to see European literatures circa 1800 as suffused by emerging national consciousness and to understand nineteenth-century British cultural theory as predominantly idealist, preoccupied with establishing an authentic, autochthonous national identity. Instead, I contribute to recent critical movements that understand “national” literary traditions through post-nationalist frameworks by recovering a materialist and internationally minded approach to theorizing culture that took shape in Britain over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Reading Places opens by reconsidering the familiar argument that eighteenth-century locodescriptive poetry, featuring a picturesque aesthetic undergirded by emerging liberal ideology, nourished Romantic-era preoccupations with natural supernaturalism and the personalization of the universal. I trace a different development, anticipated in key respects by writers such as Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and Oliver Goldsmith: the discovery of local microhistories that become legible in the physical features of specific topographical sites. Responding to contemporary antiquarian historiography and growing anxiety about the dissolution of local differences under the pressure of what we now call globalization, the Romantic tradition of reading places developed and expanded upon Enlightenment universalism not so much by retreating to localism as by tracing the manifestations of international historical processes within discrete domestic locations.

My first chapter, “The Other Within,” demonstrates the integral role that England’s oldest and most economically developed colony, Wales, played in establishing hegemonic ways of interpreting landscape and history throughout the long nineteenth century. I begin by showing how William Gilpin’s practice of picturesque view-making, first conceptualized in south Wales, incorporates colonial logics of extraction and improvement that were emerging throughout the industrializing Welsh countryside. Turning to two native responses to the new British obsession with Welsh history and culture, I demonstrate that at the same time as the Welsh landscape enabled English writers to fantasize about the productive and profitable manipulation of subjugated places, it also generated discourses of resistance to imperial power. Iolo Morganwg’s “philosophy of history” articulates a dialectical engagement with the history of English

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oppression that promises to open onto a new, Welsh world order. Richard Llwyd’s long topographical poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) uses antiquarian place reading to unsettle Whig historiographical accounts of the English domination of Wales. The chapter argues that, despite critical neglect over the last two centuries, Romantic Wales was a crucial testing-ground in the development both of techniques of colonial control and of practices of anti-imperial resistance.

My second chapter, “A Tale of Two Skulls,” focuses on Irish Gothic, a genre that makes Ireland’s history of colonial violence horrifyingly legible. Beginning with a consideration of Edmund Burke’s emphatic but little-studied contempt for antiquarian history, I show that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians portrayed Irish landscapes as saturated with traces of exploitation and dominance – a legible public record of colonial violence that kept threatening to erupt into the Romantic present. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Sydney Owenson compares the Irish landscape to a dizzying array of British overseas colonies and strategic holdings, so that Ireland functions as a dark mirror of insatiable colonial ambition. I then read James Hardiman’s narrative of the destruction of the skull of the eighteenth-century Irish bard Carolan at the hands of “a northern Orangeman” in 1796 as an instance of colonial erasure of native archives. Finally, the chapter turns to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard (1863), which also recovers a history of colonial violence from a disinterred Irish skull. The novel uses the emblem of a crushed and trepanned – but crucially still legible – skull to figure colonial violence as seeping from Irish history through the Irish soil and into vengeful Irish bodies.

Moving from the anticolonial critique manifest in Irish place reading to explore how the topos was used in the service of a British nationalist project, Chapter Three, “Walter Scott’s Nationalist Internationalism,” argues that Scott’s immensely successful but now neglected verse romances articulate a collectivism that accounts both for their unprecedented wartime popularity and for their sudden fall from favor in the postwar period. By casting rural British landscapes as virtual storehouses whose physical features register evidence of a common heroic past that belongs equally to all Britons, the verse romances both defuse intranational difference and reassure their readers that the nation could withstand Napoleonic invasion. Although their rousing collectivism struck a chord across class lines in the uncertain days of the Napoleonic Wars, intensified class warfare in the postwar moment provoked deep skepticism of their morality and social utility. As the threat of invasion subsided, the poems’ nationalistic promises became less urgently appealing even as their economic implications became newly uncomfortable. Against critical claims that Scott outgrew writing poetry, I argue that his shift from verse to prose romance owed as much to changing geopolitical conditions as it did to his artistic development. While Scott is often cast as an inventor of national tradition and of cultural Scottishness more generally, I show that much of his international appeal was due to his unparalleled ability to reveal Scottish culture as a contingent product of global and hyperlocal forces (military invasions, small-time smuggling, climate change, and traditional agricultural practices, for instance), and to make the retrieval of these occluded histories pleasurable to diverse and far-flung audiences.

My last chapter, “The Global Parish: Anglicanism, Localism, Empire,” examines nineteenth-century debates over the imperial function of the Anglican Church at home and abroad. I begin by showing how William Wordsworth’s The Excursion makes a Church-guided program of monitorial pedagogy invented by a Scotsman and applied in India (Andrew Bell’s “Madras System”) integral to the construction of an English national culture. For Wordsworth, unifying the nation entails teaching the populace to read, both literally and figuratively, for it is

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only once The Excursion’s local places become historically legible that domestic community and national harmony can take root. Turning to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State Government, I show that Coleridge recognized and rejected the simultaneously local and international materialism implicit in the place reading tradition from antiquarianism through Scott to The Excursion. Coleridge and his Victorian heir John Ruskin try to transcend the materialist and historicist impulses latent in Scott and Wordsworth by pivoting to an idealist medieval socialism that positions materialism as an unreliable – and dangerously foreign – foundation upon which to construct a national culture.

A coda on Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the opening chapters of Capital casts Marx’s understanding of commodities as “congealing” human labor as a different kind of departure from the Romantic place reading tradition. Marx revives Enlightenment universalist projects that find in all sites the same didactic message and the same universal history. Such international historical materialism rebuffs the idealist loco-socialisms of Coleridge and Ruskin, even as its will to scientific systematization occludes the materialist historicisms on offer in various instances of Romantic place reading. Reading Places recovers a pre-Marxian British tradition of using literature to theorize culture as the product of international material processes; it ends by tracing that tradition’s echoes in the twentieth-century cultural histories and theories of writers like Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, who sought to restore local densities to Marxian materialism.

In the Victorian period, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence and anxiety than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters and plots. Simultaneously, no assumption about women's reading seemed to be more axiomatic. Conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, artists and scientists, and novelists and critics throughout the long nineteenth century believed implicitly in women's essential tendency to internalize textual perspectives to their detriment. My dissertation re-thinks the discourse of "crisis" over women's literary identification in opposition to increasing representation of what I call "wayward reading," in which women approached identification as a flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion. I argue that the constant anxiety expressed by Victorian writers about women's absorption in literature helped to reify irrational and involuntary identification as the feminine norm, even while accounts of women's elective reading response defied this narrative.

This study analyzes and contextualizes three major types of deliberately wayward reading in the Victorian era, which challenge the premises of gendered identification that often obtain in criticism and pedagogy today. The first chapter explores the imaginative license granted to women readers, as opposed to women writers, to identify with male subjects. While such literary identification with men was believed to bolster women's marital and relational sympathies, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh depicts an artistic form of masculine identification that, unlike marriage, preserves the integrity of female subjectivity. The second chapter examines the multiple crises prompted by the sensation genre about the representation of female characters, which mirror contemporary concerns about the representation of women sought by the burgeoning women's suffrage movement. I contend that the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon do not exploit the reader's "feminine" nerves, but rather facilitate morally conscious, elective identification. By the fin de siècle, a new crisis emerged over the possibility of women's under-identification with literature as a result of their increased access to higher education and professionalization. George Gissing's New Grub Street and The Odd Women, as well as the New Woman novels of Charlotte Riddell, Mary Cholmondeley, and George Paston, all engage with the concept of female literary detachment as a kind of morbid pathology: a trope that demonstrates how necessary emotional identification was and is for defining femininity.

The concluding chapter of the dissertation applies these examples of wayward reading and the empirical research of recent cognitive poetics and psychology studies to pedagogy, in order to recuperate identification as a learning technology in the modern classroom. I argue that understanding these historical contexts of reading response provides students with awareness of the flexibility of their own interpretive skills--their own capacity for wayward identifications--as well as a new way of examining the representation of reading in nineteenth-century literature.

In my dissertation I argue for a new history of female Romanticism in which the romance - and particularly the Gothic romance - comes to represent the transformative power of the aesthetic for the female reader. The literary figure in which this formulation inheres is the Female Quixote - an eighteenth-century amalgamation of Cervantes's reading idealist and the satirized figure of the learned woman - who embodies both aesthetic enthusiasm and a feminist claim on the world of knowledge. While the Female Quixote has generally been understood as a satirical figure, I show that she is actually at the forefront of a development in British aesthetics in which art comes to be newly valued as a bulwark against worldliness. Such a development arises as part of mid-eighteenth-century sensibility culture and changes the meaning of an aesthetic practice that had been to that point criticized and satirized - that of over-investment in the arts, associated, as I show, with both the figure of the connoisseur and of the Female Quixote. Connoisseurship emerges in this period as a revolutionary aesthetic practice and has the most significant implications for its female representative, the Female Quixote, who mobilizes it against traditional femininity. I draw upon Matt Hills's theorization of connoisseurship, as a mode of aesthetic reception which is both passionately invested and sophisticatedly detached, to argue that this is why such a stance has historically been denied to women, rooted in the "real" and the domestic, and emerges as a feminist and idealist practice in Female Quixotism. The Gothic romance emerged as a vehicle for the new female connoisseur because of its generically conventional form, which enables connoisseurial mastery, and its anti-realist content, which renders it an emblem for the aesthetic more broadly and a counter to the domestic more particularly.

My introduction and my first chapter map out a new history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Female Quixotism in conjunction with eighteenth-century theories of connoisseurship in order to trace the rise of a feminist investment in aesthetics and define what I call the female connoisseur. After this macro-reading, I focus in my second chapter on what I identify as a particularly radical and important manifestation of the female connoisseur: Germaine de Staël's Corinne, heroine of her 1807 eponymous novel. Staël develops the figure of the aesthetic woman to what she aspires to be in the British tradition: female artist and genius. In my third chapter, I look at an actual historical instance of female connoisseurship: the female reader-writers of The Lady's Magazine (1770-1832). The Lady's was the first periodical to publish tales and serialized novels in the newly invented mode of the Gothic romance, rendering their female readers the first experts in this new aesthetic mode. Further, the Lady's solicited Gothic romances from its female readers, encouraging them to become connoisseurs of the Gothic. The importance of the Gothic to the new female aestheticism I am tracing is rendered most powerfully in Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), the focus of my fourth chapter. Brontë's novel instantiates the logic of female connoisseurship in that its reliance on romance conventions constitutes its female readers, who recognize these conventions, as aesthetic subjects. I close with a chapter that looks at the state of female connoisseurship today and its relationship to the Gothic. I posit that the horror film is the cultural site in which the feminist implications of connoisseurship are most salient. Like its Gothic novel predecessor, the woman's horror film relies on the Romantic formula in which the Gothic stands in for the aesthetic, a realm only partially open to women and so aspired to by a questing female figure; the Female Quixote has become Carol Clover's Final Girl.