Vigorous Currents, Painful Archives: The Production of Affect and History in Poe\u27s Tale of the Ragged Mountains

First delivered as a paper at the Poe conference in Philadelphia in 2009, this extended version reveals how Poe\u27s mesmeric tale can help us rethink trauma theory before Freud. Poe\u27s strategic use of archival materials concerning an 18th-century insurrection in India provides compelling insight into the transmission of affect in the construction of global histories. --author-supplied descriptio

Review of Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading

Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 241 pp. ISBN 0198184344

Concord Companions: Margaret Fuller, Friendship, and Desire

In this paper, we examine the rhetoric of friendship and desire in mid-nineteenth-century American writing. We begin by looking at Emerson's essay on friendship and Thoreau's poem "Sympathy" (1840) to provide a context for reading Margaret Fuller's fascinating texts on samesex bonds between women. Of particular interest to us is Fuller's translation of Elizabeth von Arnim's Die Gunderode (1840), a collection of letters between Arnim and the German Romantic poet Karoline von Gunderode which provides compelling insights into the early to mid-nineteenth-century continuum between female friendship and same-sex desire. We situate this translation alongside Fuller's own female friendships and expressions of love for women, more specifically her declarations of love to Anna Barker and, later, to George Sand. This latter relationship, we suggest, was a source of admiration and anxiety, for Sand's cross-dressing and fluid sense of gender identity was simultaneously celebrated and condemned in Fuller's Women in the Nineteenth Century (1843)