Too Much, Not Enough: Queer Sensibilities in 18th-19th Century Literature

When it comes to feelings, who gets to have them, and who gets to be indifferent to them? What are the “right” ones, and what are the “wrong” ones? Who is oversensitive and who is insensible? From the sentimental gentleman to the swooning damsel, from awkward nerds to decadent artists, how can we understand deviant attachments, wayward attention, and nervous conditions that fall to the side of normative accounts of modernity? In this course, we will trace these questions in texts from the Romantic and post-Romantic periods. We will also attend to several critical approaches such as disability studies/crip theory, affect theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Authors might include Sterne, Equiano, Walpole, de Quincey, Austen, Forster, Wilde, James.