Essays
Dissecting the Gothic: Horror and the Romantic Body in Sheridan LeFanu’s In a Glass Darkly
Chapter in Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond, edited by George Kazantzidis and Chiara Thumiger
Far from supporting the efforts of his doctor-narrator to solve the mystery, this hidden context from Romantic medicine affords Le Fanu the scaffolding for a very different kind of horror story: the gothic ironizing of medical authority…
Post-Organic Forms: The Poetics of Bituminous Waste
Essay written with Meg Zhang for Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism
Perhaps unexpectedly, from the earliest appearances of bitumen in poetry, writers representing the fossil fuel—from Homer, Plutarch, and Ovid to John Milton and the English Romantic poets—have evolved a continuous critique of bitumen as a form of waste that troubles the distinction between organic and inorganic matter.
How ‘My Body, My Choice’ Came to Define the Vaccine Skepticism Movement
Opinion editorial written with Dennis Tenen and Rishi Goyal for Los Angeles Times
The language, syntax and rhetoric used to express hesitancy has been borrowed from other debates, usually over divisive political issues. The widespread familiarity of the language to large numbers of people makes the message all the more powerful…
Medical Formalism
Essay for Keats-Shelley Journal
The great biologist J. B. S. Haldane commented that ‘Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were up-to-date’ in scientific knowledge, particularly medicine… Yet, despite their writing’s tropological exchanges with medicine, Keats, Shelley, and their circle are not usually recognized for their formalist engagements with the increasingly rival field…
Wordsworth’s Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion
Essay for Romanticism
Francis Jeffrey’s post-mortem on William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) in The Edinburgh Review (which begins, infamously, with ‘This will never do’) links the poem’s discursive and textural qualities to the watery, distended form of a dropsical organ –Wordsworth’s own supposedly hydrocephalic brain…
Keats’s Gelding
Essay for Keats Letters Project
This is a recently discovered letter, exciting both for its newly articulated place within Keats’s manuscript archive and for its literary-historical value as it documents the poet’s vacillating emotions on the cusp of the publication of Endymion…
Heathcliff’s Amours
Essay for Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel
In the heart of Brontë country in Yorkshire, an unexpected gathering: men, naked, reading Victorian novels to an audience of clothed, mostly female listeners. As the founder of Naked Boys Reading concludes (with satisfaction), ‘it’s problematic’...
Romantic Balloons: towards a Formalist Technology of Poetics
Essay for Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
In contrast to the familiar symbol of the ‘well wrought urn’ as a figure for formalism, the balloon is an alternative kind of vessel for poetics; it is characterized by dynamism, a future-oriented perspective, and sustained association with women’s labor. In contrast to the urn, the balloon offers a new model for close reading, one that demands an active engagement with literary form not as a static objet d’art but as an operable technology…
Romantic Autopsy and Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude
Essay for European Romantic Review. The essay won the Best Graduate Student Paper Prize at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference
In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously points out the ‘philosophical contradistinction of Poetry and Science,’ and the poems from that volume confirm his distrust of scientific analysis…
Skeletons and Injections: William Hunter’s Lectures on Anatomy and Aesthetics
Essay for University of Glasgow Library Special Collections
If his students blended anatomy with their artwork, Hunter believed, the results would change the course of world history: ‘Why should not posterity be able to say that the latter half of the 18th Century was the most distinguished period in the annals of human Genius?’
‘So she has been educated by a vulgar, silly, conceited French governess!’ Social anxieties, satirical portraits, and the eighteenth-century French instructor
Essay for Gender and Education
Concerns about the influence of the French in England and about education’s questionable effects on a young girl’s character converge in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary depictions of the French instructor…
Lord Byron, Literary Detective: The Recovery of Lady Wortley Montagu’s Long-Lost Venetian Letters
Essay for The Byron Journal
The poet’s ‘good offices’ in uncovering her lost works were only to bear fruit long after Byron undertook his research. However, his recommendation that Montagu’s love-letters should be published was eventually realised…
Identifying Jane Austen’s ‘Boarding-school’: A Proposed Author for The Governess, or the Boarding School Dissected
Essay for Persuasions
The play’s authorship has been a mystery to scholars since at least 1871. The identification of Miss Paxton as the author sheds light on the precarious role of the late eighteenth-century schoolmistress…