My book project, tentatively titled Beyond the Kindly Ones: A Theory of the Tragic Novel, proposes a model of the novel for which the consequential lineage is tragedy instead of the epic, as Lukács suggests, to describe its relation to totality. Instead of seeing Goethe’s choice of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as a symbol of youth, like Moretti does, I emphasize tragedy’s potential for transformation. As Greece increasingly becomes the model on which Britain builds its nationhood, it is in the image of a slave holding nation which usually did not offer citizenship to women and foreigners. The novel takes up this image of Greece through contemporary debates concerning democracy, the domestic as a reflection of empire, and the controlling myths necessary to shore up the values of nations undergoing transformation while simultaneously offering such ideas as a problem. Moving away from reconciliation models as a guiding theme of the Bildungsroman, which frames time as nostalgic or an intermediary while we are between gods and reigning value systems, my research incorporates queer theory to show how the novel manipulates this image of Greece as world making and orients it to the future. In this radical formulation the harm caused by the existing world exposes negative possibilities of a new world that can be founded on the faults of the existing one. Taking Aeschylus’s Oresteia as a central text that emphasizes the ethical transformation of the city through force, my book examines the choice between the claims of the incoming order representing Orestes and Athena and the claims of the outgoing order of the Erinyes, or Kindly Ones. Following in the critical tradition of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig, I argue that rejecting both the pre-political and consequent political systems of justice offered to us in the final scenes is essential to a rethinking of democratic culture and social justice.  As we ask what would make life sustainable for characters failing in the world of the novel, we see what is lacking in a nineteenth-century world from which gods are receding and industrial capitalism is emerging, thereby significantly revising not only concepts of justice but the scales of both who can deliver it and who can hope for it.

I am also revising a recent paper I gave on Dickens’ Great Expectations and Eddie Izzard’s engagement with the novel in the service of disability and trans rights. “Izzard Does Dickens: Great Expectations’ Queer Afterlife” discusses the ongoing relevance of the novel as a cultural touchstone for transformation.

Virtually Hardy is an online archive of the work of Thomas Hardy and home of Intertextual Tess, a trans-historical, electronic version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles utilizing the Manifold platform. I have received a grant to begin developing Intertextual Tess into an online pedagogical tool that will serve as an apprentice for close reading as well as presenting a new model for critical editions of texts.

Anchored in the Victorian period in England and the Second Empire in France, my dissertation undertakes the question of what the novel does, especially in its most ambitious instances. My dissertation, Failures of Grace: Limits of Tragedy in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, delves into the formal references as well as literary allusions to tragedy in the novels of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and Emile Zola to ask how tragedy can be understood in reference to concepts approaching obsolescence such as of providence, fate, and grace. It further asks how the marriage plot intersects with those evolving meanings. Using theories of the novel conceived of by Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and Northrop Frye I consider how impoverished populations and women become subjects that challenge the tradition of tragedy. In this sense, my work addresses the debate over tragic theory, especially the popular theory of George Steiner as it is contested by Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams, along with the less recognized work of Peter Szondi.