Date of Graduation
2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
Dennis Allen
Committee Co-Chair
Lara Farina
Committee Member
Marilyn Francus
Committee Member
Adam Komisaruk
Committee Member
Richard Sha
Abstract
Error is both a purposeless wandering and a purposeful identification of a mistake. Each chapter analyzes texts from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries which feature female characters and the epilogue turns to the autobiographical writing of a man in the 21st-century. Chapters on William Godwin's memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Alderson Opie's Dangers of Coquetry , Anne Plumptre's Something New, Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy, and Thomas Beatie's autography Labor of Love feature characters---both real and fictional--- who destabilize what Bourdieu calls "collective[ly] misrecogn[ized]" understandings of identity as truth/error and "either/or." Utilizing notions of error developed by Zachary Sng and Seth Lerer, I take up the category of error as a provisional and tactical strategy to argue that identities, especially gender identities, are errant: wandering, nonsystematic, and nonsystematizable. In doing so, I dislodge the notion that identity is always systematic and demonstrate its queer errancy. I analyze British literature written during the Romantic era, specifically from 1790-1840, because these years help to set the stage for the emergence of sexual and gender identity categories throughout the rest of the 19th century---a period that shapes today's notions of sexuality and gender. Finally, the concept of errancy in particular addresses the concerns of scholars like Carla Freccero, Viviane Namaste and Steven Angelides who argue that "queer" has not yet gone far enough in its immateriality or in problematizing and addressing identity's fixity.
Recommended Citation
Pershing, Teresa M., "Errant Romanticism: Queering Gender and Sexuality in British Literature, 1790-1840" (2016). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6408.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6408