Description
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsExordium | 1
Part I: Potentiality and Gesture
1 Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth: Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces | 23
2 “First Love”: Gesture and the Emergence of Desire in Eudora Welty | 50
Part II: Novels and the Beginnings of Character
3 Robinson Crusoe and the Inception of Speech | 73
4 The Clock Finger at Nought: Daniel Deronda and the Positing of Perspective | 91
5 Proto-Reading and the Positing of Character in Our Mutual Friend | 103
Part III: Our Stony Ancestry
6 Ovid and Orpheus | 127
7 Wallace Stevens and the Temporalities of Inception and Embodiment | 148
Part IV: Solitude and Queer Origins
8 “Epitaph, the Idiom of Man”: Imaginings of the Beginning | 177
9 Etiology, Solitude, and Queer Incipience | 199
Acknowledgments | 223
Notes | 227
Index | 283
