Plagiarists, Sodomites, and Cannibals: Authorship and the History of Sexuality, 1740-1820

Romantic-period authors, reviewers, and critics persistently invoked sodomy and cannibalism when criticizing literary ‘perversions,’ the most significant of which was plagiarism. This dissertation accounts for this cluster of associations and elucidates their meaning for the histories of sexuality and authorship more broadly. First, I trace how critical discourse in the Romantic period projected older anxieties about sodomy and other kinds of ‘perverse incorporations’ onto authorship. Second, I contend that features of late eighteenth-century authorship actually prefigure structures integral to modern sexuality. In the eighteenth century, Britons and Americans used authorship as a primary concept with which to articulate the relationships between subjects, between a subject and the public, and between a subject and the law. By the end of the nineteenth century, heterosexuality had taken precedence as the defining feature of subjectivity in these relationships. Over the course of the Romantic period, authorship underwent a ‘straightening’ that paradoxically involved the incorporation and assimilation of the very textual and corporeal perversions—particularly plagiarism, cannibalism, and sodomy—against which normative authorship, and normative masculinity, continued to be defined. This project thus makes two broader claims: it argues that incorporation and subsequent disavowal form the basis by which modern masculine subjects define themselves, and it describes and analyzes the incorporative structure of perversion in modern Anglo-British culture more generally. This project focuses on the work and reception of authors with uneasy or contested relationships to their source texts, and whose own sexual sensibilities were richly unconventional: Thomas Gray, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Brockden Brown. These figures are instructive not because their work reveals some essential ‘gayness’ or ‘queerness,’ but because their blackmailability (in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known formulation) both as men and as authors allows us to see more clearly the logic underlying masculine sexuality and authorship in the period more generally