For Johnson, the “nose of the mind” can be understood as closely connected to a notion of the mind’s nose—in other words, the osmology or scent-connotations insofar as we can recover them. As I have argued elsewhere, the level to which that ambition is achievable is low. That said, in this essay I explore a few ways we can examine the work of…[Read more]

Jane Austen’s Sanditon (begun 1807) is something of a mystery for Austen scholars. Since its first description in 1871 and its publication in 1925, Austen’s incomplete final novel fragment has inspired innumerable essays speculating about Austen’s intentions and plans, and countless continuations that attempt to provide a plot on top of Austen’s…[Read more]

Between 1776 and 1800 — at the end of Garrick’s reign at Drury and the rise of Edmund Kean — the shape of Europe, the role of women in the public sphere, and even the size of London’s patent theatres underwent renovation and reconstitution. The results often wore familiar faces, even as meaning was changed by new contexts and editorial f…[Read more]

Many innovations in Samuel Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison, set it apart. I argue that the ways in which Richardson innovated in the final volume in particular altered his attitude toward closure. Richardson carried this modified way of thinking into the work of his late life, as self-editor and anthologizer. Grandison is a vital…[Read more]

This essay is part of a larger project that investigates the ways in which Burney’s endings (in her novels, plays, and life-writing) create a sense (or non-sense) of an ending. Here I consider Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer, in its place as Burney’s final fictional ending. In my reading of Burney’s novel-writing career, The Wanderer is at t…[Read more]

Sarah Fielding promoted rational reading practices through techniques that often differed from those used in the mid-eighteenth-century novel, particularly the contrary techniques employed by Samuel Richardson and her brother, Henry Fielding. Examining Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa and her co-authored “dramatic fable” The Cry, this essay argue…[Read more]

From Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2010.

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]