The book: it’s a soothingly familiar technology, one we all know how to operate. Open the front covers to reveal the text; turn the page to continue reading. Yet even the most seemingly ordinary aspects of the book, like titles and page numbers, had to be invented. In this course, we will work to defamiliarize the book, investigating how the f…[Read more]

Tristram Shandy itself was at the forefront of technological innovations, both as copyright protection and as bravura performance. What John Mullan has called the “stuff” of Tristram Shandy are among the most accessible ways into the text.
Of these techniques, marbling is one of the easier (and more pleasurable) techniques to introduce into the…[Read more]

Like Catherine Morland, we all dream of discovering that a manuscript tucked away in an archive, among dusty boxes in an attic, or in a mysterious chest in our guest room is really a long-forgotten work by a beloved author. This is the story of a collector who thought he had done just that – and a scholar who almost believed it. Fair warning: t…[Read more]

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]

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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]