The erotics of historicism: The historical novel, the discipline of history, and the politics of manly feeling, 1790--1890

This dissertation argues that history's disciplinary transformation during Britain's long nineteenth-century entailed---indeed, depended on---contests over the national importance of "manly" feeling and the role that such feeling plays in acquiring an understanding of history.; I contend that Edmund Burke's and Thomas Paine's political writings, Thomas Rowlandson's caricatures, Victorian review essays, and, in particular, Walter Scott's historical novels often represent the process of knowing the past as educating the knower sentimentally and sexually. They portray this education, in short, as initiating the knower into various carnal knowledges: many even suggest that the constitutions of individuals' feeling bodies mark their competence as historical thinkers. Romantic and Victorian struggles to define what "counts" as historical knowledge thus became as much clashes over the nature of proper sentimental and sexual feelings as they were debates strictly over epistemology. Not only did writers examine the relationship of sound historical epistemology to the constitution of the historical knower's feeling body, but they also viewed various histories' authorities as dependent on the propriety of the carnal knowledges that they produced. In turn, late Victorian historians' efforts to legitimize and professionalize history by refashioning it as a science entailed trying to extricate historical judgment from sentimentality and sexuality altogether. The distance that consequently developed between historical novels and "scientific" histories resulted from the fact that the historical novel never achieved or perhaps never attempted similar extrications.; Scholars of gender have argued recently that masculinity's relationship to sentimentality and sexuality was also in crisis throughout the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, then, the struggles over history that I identify in British texts from the period tend to play out as contests over history's and the historian's "manliness" too. "Manliness" provided a vessel for nineteenth-century historical thinkers to negotiate anxieties over whether the discipline of history properly disciplines feeling bodies. At the same time, however, I also critique scholars' tendency to homogenize nineteenth-century masculinity and to discuss it as if its only outside in the period were femininity. History's Victorian-era transformation, I argue, depended in part on attempts to define proper masculinity historically and developmentally against other masculinities.