Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Feminist writers in British Romanticism often developed alternatives to linear time. Viewing time as a system of social control, writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley wrote about current events as if they possessed knowledge from the future. Fracture Feminism explores this tradition with a perspective informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, showing how time can be imagined to contain a hidden fracture-and how that fracture, when claimed as a point of view, could be the basis for an emancipatory politics. Arguing that the period's most radical experiments in undoing time stemmed from the era's discourses of gender and women's rights, Fracture Feminism asks: to what extent could women "belong" to their historical moment, given their political and social marginalization? How would voices from the future interrupt the ordinary procedures of political debate? What if utopia were understood as a time rather than a place, and its time were already inside the present? Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 The Uses of History in Wollstonecraft’s Afterlives A Dead Feminists’ Society, Differently Constituted Dead Feminists’ Society II: “Ithuriel” Dead Feminists’ Society III: A Letter to the Women of A Letter to the Women of England On the Uses of History in “On the Uses of History” Chapter 2 Adoptive Siblings across Oceans of Futurity: Paul and Virginia and The Victim of Prejudice The Ocean of Futurity: Parergonal Paul and Virginia Literature and the Seeds of Future Enslavement Mary Hays: A Vindication of the Rights of the Oedipus Complex The Victim of Prejudice/The Children of Oedipus Chapter 3 Della Cruscan Time The Queer Asynchronies of Mary Robinson’s Ainsi va le Monde Robinson’s Merry Meets Merry’s Cowley: The Laurel of Liberty The Two Della Cruscas of Two “To Della Crusca”s Merry’s Polypoetics: An Experiment in Llanguage “Ode to Folly”’s Contretempopian Tropes Chapter 4 Future Poetry: Clock Time Misses Barbauld, Smith, Richardson, and Hemans Barbauld’s “Love and Time” and “Washing Day” The Hermitage of Beachy Head Richardson: The Hospitality of Harvest-Home Felicia Hemans, Between Psychosis and Perversion Byronic Destinerrance in “A Spirit’s Return” Chapter 5 Gulzara and The Last Man: Worldwide-izing the Roman à Clef The Temporality of Gulzara “Hours Passed—Centuries”: The Future Orientation of The Last Man Learning to Count: My Three Brothers Paul, Lionel Verney, and Me Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index