This essay looks at the letters of Horace Walpole through the lens of the contemporary performance theory of José Muñoz in order to suggest the ways in which Walpole’s feelings in the past reach us with a hope for the future. By looking at touchstones in Horace Walpole’s life, I look for a model of queer relationality that is centuries ahead of its time.

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

A review of Gothic Fiction and Picture Identification: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835 (JHUP, 2012), in which Kamilla Elliott asks how Gothic Portraits help shape the history of picture identification

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

This essay argues that Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random—often characterized as a “robust adventure story”—puts male-male relations at the center of the world it describes. Tracing homosocial relations in the novel, it reveals that male relations are given an intensity that they rarely have in other fiction of the period. Smollett’s fear of giving in to male desire means that he only gives in to it more intensely than ever. That is what makes Roderick Random’s world of masculine desire so truly robust.

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland challenges us to consider what happens to gothic tropes as they are carried across the Atlantic. The novel also asks us to consider the function of sentiment in establishing gothic effects as well as how gothic emotionality enables seduction and makes it, in at least one sense, inevitable. Sentiment and seduction, in Brown's hands, are features of the gothic that render experience both questionable and meaningless. The effect that is created in the novel is often called "uncanny";1 but I would prefer to call such effects "queer." I use "queer" in this essay to signify a number of different things. In the first place, queer signifies what is odd and, perhaps in an uncanny way, off-putting, bizarre, or strange. I am interested in how the text gives rise to such effects. I also use queer as a transitive verb, in the sense of queering a situation or relationship. This happens a lot in Brown's novel, and I want to look at these situations and examine what they share. Finally, I use the word queer to describe nonnormative sexual relations of various kinds, as indeed I did in my recent book, Queer Gothic.2KeywordsAmerican LiteratureDomestic SpaceReligious ManiaSubsequent CitationNorth American LiteratureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Fanny Price: “Is she solemn?—Is she queer?—Is she prudish?” George E. Haggerty (bio) In Memory of Ralph W. Rader In his 1973 landmark essay, “Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel,” Ralph W. Rader articulated a concept of the novel form that has resonated with his students and novel critics and theorists since that time. For Rader, novels “present themselves to intuition as self-intelligible and self-justifying, that is, as forms the act of understanding which could be experienced as its own justification.”1 In explaining this concept further, Rader describes what he calls the “general action model,” which specifies works of fiction designed to develop and maximize concern for a character (or characters) along a line of development in which the ground of concern is a dynamically shifting contrast between the reader’s sense of the immediate and ultimate fate of the character (or characters) as compared with his (or their) immediate and ultimate desert, and to resolve this concern by a surprising but probable extension of the means used to raise it, so as to give the reader the greatest satisfaction in the ultimate fate of the character (or characters). To put it more simply, the author pits our induced sense of what will happen to a character against our induced sense of what we want to happen to him, our hopes against our fears, in order to give the greatest pleasure appropriate to their resolution.2 “The action model describes a work,” Rader says further, “which the reader at some level of consciousness must know from the outset is being shaped beneath its realistic surface to meet the requirements of desire.”3 As articulated, this “action model” would apply to most novels in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition, and it applies to none more obviously than to the novels of Jane Austen. [End Page 175] Austen usually brings her novels to tidy, if somewhat frustrating, conclusions. Sense and Sensibility (1811) ends with both sisters marrying, even if no one is fully persuaded that Brandon is right for Marianne; and in the other novels, the closure is clear, even if peremptory. But in Mansfield Park (1814), especially for twenty-first-century readers, there is a huge obstacle to narrative closure at the end of the novel. That difficulty involves Fanny Price herself. Fanny Price is of course central to the structure of the novel, just as her fate is central to the resolution of the plot. In each of her novels, Austen molds her central characters so carefully that they carry the burden of plot and resolution exactly as she intends: this is true of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot. It must also be true of Fanny Price, even if she challenges our sympathies in various ways. Why is Fanny so timid and self-effacing? Why so relentlessly moral and so unrelievedly judgmental? What is the function of a character who seems at times spineless, even though we know she has a spine that is perhaps too rigid? Joyce Jenkins represents this school of response to Fanny when she says, “there are at least three reasons for thinking that Fanny is not to be taken as a moral ideal in spite of her purity of principle. First, her principles may be good, but her sentiments are suspect. Second, she is a model of passivity and inaction. Third, she is a rule-governed wet blanket.”4 Of course, this is how other characters in the novel think of Fanny too. By seeing her mind and understanding her emotion, are we not given a different perspective? Critics point to Austen’s astonishingly effective handling of the details of plot and her rich evocation of character. For Janet Todd, the key to Austen’s “universal popularity” is “her ability to create the illusion of psychologically believable and self-reflecting characters.”5 Rader argues that Austen’s novels are popular also because they adhere to what he calls “Johnson’s Rule.” He finds this rule in Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), where Samuel Johnson says: “In narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I...

Reviewed by: The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764-1820 George E. Haggerty (bio) Sue Chaplin . The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764-1820. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. vii+184pp. US$85. ISBN 978-0-230-50755-5. Sue Chaplin's recent study is an intriguing and somewhat perplexing volume. It is most interesting in its approach to the "Gothic" qualities of legal discourse. This seems to be the main thrust of the study, but Chaplin's rather loose definition of Gothic makes it less valuable as an heuristic than I imagine she would like it to be. Nevertheless, one gets the point clearly enough. She says in the introduction that she is interested in "the extent to which the law and the Gothic coincide ontologically. This work," she says, "investigates the relation between the absolute radical indeterminacy of what the West calls 'law,' and what it has come to call 'Gothic'" (2). This is an exciting challenge, to be sure, and the book does achieve a lot of what it sets out to do. The first chapter, "Fictions of Origin," explores some of the more haunted attempts to theorize the origins of law. Using Pierre Legendre on the question of transmission, alongside Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva, and other cultural theorists, she is able to posit a heady case. As she puts it, "The identification of the law with logos may ... be understood as an attempt to refute a deathly difference that threatens the erasure of meaning" (27). Her interest in the work of French feminists like Kristeva (who although not French worked in France) and Luce Irigaray in relation to law leads her almost inevitably to the question of Antigone and the position of the woman before the law. Although Chaplin is by no means the first to talk about abjection and the Gothic, her use of the concept of abjection to take her from the law into the Gothic is richly provocative. As soon as she raises this theoretical dilemma of Antigone, one can imagine how some of the chapters, those for instance on Ann Radcliffe and Sophia Lee, will be structured. As she puts it, "Revealing the dreadful contingency of constructions of the logos, the myth of Antigone ... reveals (like the Gothic fictions this work will discuss) that the law which establishes the 'truth' of the cultural symbolic order is not sacred, not fixed, not singular, not 'pure and simple': it is nothing but difference" (34-35). Chapters 2 and 3, "'Written in the Black Letter': The Gothic and/ in the Rule of Law" and "Spectres of Law in The Castle of Otranto" are intricately related. Chaplin begins by talking about how prefaces affect texts—she is thinking of course of the first bogus preface to The Castle of Otranto—but she arrives there by first discussing the ways in which prefaces operate in the world of law "to supplement, legitimate, but also often to contest the word of law" (38). She uses Žižek to explain how the law is haunted by its dependence on supplementarity, and she then goes on to claim that "constructions of the Gothic across a range of discourses in this period contributed to the formation of a certain [End Page 137] historically specific, Gothic narrative of legal origin" (39). She plays this against what she understands as the "Gothicisation" of English law, which "threatened to infect Enlightenment jurisprudence with a pre-modern savagery and a degree of historical and textual uncertainty that was inimical to truth and reason" (39). When she goes on to discuss The Castle of Otranto, it is not terribly surprising that Chaplin argues that Walpole's novel "is a fiction obsessed with the origin and legitimacy of the rule of law" (55). Her discussion of the novel, which begins with a consideration of Walpole's dream text about the novel's inception, builds on her earlier insights, and those theorists I have already cited, to make a strong case about the function of law in this novel. Manfred is obsessed by the grotesque signs of the illegitimacy of his own rule, and as these concerns consume him he "blinds...

A discussion of the career of Edward Kynaston, both when he acted in women’s roles and when he proceeded to act in male roles. The essay looks at the kind of male roles that Kynaston performs and makes some conclusions about masculinity in the later seventeenth century.

Reviewed by: A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain George Haggerty A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain. By Robert Darby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 368. $35.00 (cloth). Robert Darby has added a fascinating chapter to the history of sexuality by detailing the attitudes toward the foreskin and the rise of circumcision in Britain throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The book is impressive in its scholarly erudition and depth of observation, and it builds on various studies of sexuality, especially masturbation, by Thomas Laqueur and others. In addition to its careful attention to detail and its impressive range of observations, the book is largely a pleasure to read. Clear and carefully argued, it builds a case that is as fascinating as it is penetrating. At times there are repetitions and restatements of facts stated earlier, but in every case the new context seems to warrant these repetitions, and I could not imagine the study any shorter. Because Darby writes so clearly about such complex and at times contradictory material, I would be pleased to have the study continue even further into the twentieth century and into cultures beyond the British. He does have a good deal to say about the United States and Australia, to be sure, but we have to wait for a more complete study of the latter, which we are assured in the conclusion is his next book-length project. The thesis of this book is a simple one. In the eighteenth century circumcision was considered an act of deformation, relegated to Jewish and Muslim cultures, but by the early twentieth century had become a fairly common medical procedure, at least among the elite classes. Darby sets out to explain that change in attitudes. In doing so he talks in detail about masturbation phobia in families, in schools, and in the British culture at large. He also talks about the ways in which various nervous complaints were connected to the foreskin. As Darby tells us in his introduction: Frederick Hodges locates the origin of circumcision in Europe and Britain specifically in the masturbation phobia of the eighteenth century and in theories of reflex neurosis, which held that disturbances of the nervous equilibrium could cause disease and which thus targeted sensitive parts of the body as the guilty parties. In this scenario, particularly according to the work of Claude-François Lallemand on spermatorrhea, erotic sensation was redefined as irritation, prepubertal orgasms misinterpreted as epilepsy, and erections viewed as pathological; as the dynamic and most sensitive part of the penis, the foreskin was particularly suspect. (7) The implications of this illogical connection make chilling reading, and at times this book is impossible to put down. "The conviction that circumcision would alter sexual behavior was thus not a side effect of a procedure adopted as a health precaution," Darby tells us, "but its original purpose" [End Page 318] (15). This is the story that Darby tells, and the general shape of his argument is what I will explain here. I want to say at the outset, though, that I think this is a wonderful study that I would recommend without qualification to historians of sexuality and medicine. Darby begins his study by looking at various eighteenth-century accounts of the foreskin. There, "in striking contrast to the nineteenth century," he points out, "there was no concern that a man's well-being was somehow threatened by his foreskin, and no sign of the 'congenital phimosis' that suddenly become so common in boys after the 1860s" (25). (Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin is too tight for the glans to emerge. It was prevalent in cases of syphilis, "since the disease often produced scabs that fused foreskin to glans" [26].) Eighteenth-century medicine and medical practice were backward by later nineteenth-century standards. Robert James, the author of a famous medical dictionary (A Medicinal Dictionary, 1743–45), referred to circumcision as a therapeutic procedure, and he also, "more ominously," according to Darby (41), discussed the operation in terms of its hygienic importance...