The queer rise of the novel: New readings in the eighteenth-century British novel, from Defoe to Austen

This dissertation examines the rise of the eighteenth-century British novel and the ways in which it is inflected by the contemporaneous emergence of sodomitical and sapphic identities organized around same-sex desires and activities. The novel is part of an ideological struggle that bears the traces of the dominant culture's attempt to silence by ridicule, invisibility, or violence same-sex identities as an "other" in order to reify the "naturalness" of bourgeois male heterosexual subjectivity and to promote British nationalism and the colonialist project. Three discursive strategies are marked by the novel: the confusion new sexual identities wrought, the retreat of those identities into text, and the ironic silencing of identity the novel helps instantiate, even as it opens new possibilities for oppositional readings and productions of meaning.;Critical of postmodern identity theory, the dissertation is organized as a series of histories and close readings intended to contribute toward the recuperation of a gay and lesbian past that has been suppressed and denied. The work examines the cultural contexts and historical background of same-sex desire in eighteenth-century England. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is discussed with reference to its role in silencing same-sex identity, even as it positions the dyadic same-sex relationship of Crusoe and Friday as central. Works of the mid-century Pamela vogue are examined as a semi-explicit acknowledgement of same-sex identities; the novels' overdetermined use of satire is a particular literary strategy that allows yet simultaneously negates the representation of alternative sexualities, including those of known sodomites of the time. Jane Austen's exploration of female friendship and same-sex desire is arguably the most sophisticated and open treatment of sapphic desire in the long eighteenth century; even though the novels end with traditional heterosexual marriage, they do not close the transgressive possibilities opened.;Despite contemporary literary critics' efforts to silence same-sex desires and activities, queer contributions to society are at the center of the construction of meaning, novels included. Recuperating queer identity enriches eighteenth-century scholarship and thereby the historical record linking that time to our own.