Jess Keiser - Nervous Fictions

I first want to thank my teachers at Cornell: Rick Bogel, Laura Brown, and Neil Saccamano. They helped this book along in its earliest, most halting stages, and in doing so, they made it possible to thrive. As I continued to work on the book over the years, I often found myself writing to thema true testament to their inspiring teaching and mentorship.

I also owe special thanks to a number of Cornell faculty for their encouragement, expertise, and mentorship: Kevin Attell, Cynthia Chase, Elisha Cohn, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Michael Jonik, Rayna Kalas, Phil Lorenz, and Jenny Mann. I developed many of the ideas in this book in conversation with numerous friends at Cornell. Bradley Depew, Ryan Dirks, Paul Flaig, and Aaron Hodges were particularly helpful. For their unflagging friendship over the years, Jacob Brogan, Cecily Swanson, Seth Perlow, and Caetlin Benson-Allott deserve special and wholly inadequate thanks.

Sarah Ellenzweig and Nancy Yousef have been two of my most important mentors. They read parts of this book and made it better. Most importantly, they believed in this project when I most badly needed it to be believed in, and for that I will be forever thankful. Thanks to Sarah and to Jack Zammito, I was able to develop important aspects of this book during a year at Rice Universitys Humanities Research Center. I especially want to thank my compatriots during that year. They helped me develop, strengthen, and nuance many of the ideas here. They include Keith Ansell-Pearson, Christian Emden, Mark Kulstad, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angie Willey, Catherine Wilson, and Derek Woods. During my time at Rice, I also got to know Charles T. Wolfe, who has been an immense help in navigating early natural philosophy and intellectual history.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my mentors and friends in eighteenth-century studies. They are an ideal audience and a group of people from whom Ive learned an immense amount. I especially need to acknowledge Al Coppola and Courtney Weiss Smith for all their helpimpossible to quantify or to ever repay. I also owe special thanks to Rick Barney, Frank Boyle, Lucinda Cole, Joe Drury, Jonathan Kramnick, Thomas Salem Manganaro, Brad Pasanek, Sean Silver, and Helen Thompson for talking over many of the ideas in this book over the years. Their insight and generosity have made every page better. For advice, encouragement, and intellectual excitement, I want to thank Dave Alff, Dave Alvarez, Misty Anderson, Leah Benedict, Tita Chico, Dwight Codr, Lynn Festa, Mike Genovese, Kevis Goodman, Dan Gustafson, Stephanie Hershinow, Suvir Kaul, Heather Keenleyside, Crystal Lake, Sue Lanser, Wendy Anne Lee, Yoon Sun Lee, Devoney Looser, Kathy Lubey, Deidre Lynch, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Bob Markley, Sandra Macpherson, Laura Miller, Chris Mounsey, Stephen Osadetz, Ruth Perry, Melinda Rabb, Katie Sagal, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joel Sodano, Danielle Spratt, Rajani Sudan, Kate Thorpe, Mark Vareschi, Beth Wallace, and Alexander Wragge-Morley.

Although I began this book in Ithaca, I finished it in Cambridge and Boston. A group of friends (new and old) made that possible. Sarah Eron, Rob Lehman, Andrew Warren, and Audrey Wasser have been my best and most trusted readers. I also want to thank members of the Dialectical Reading Group at Harvard (especially Carly Yingst and Matthias Rudolf). My students at Washington and Lee and at Tufts have been my best interlocutors. Nick Belmore and Collin Cook were particularly helpful and inspiring as I developed this project. I also want to thank David Auerbach for generously discussing Sellars and philosophy of mind with me. My colleagues at Washington and Lee were extraordinarily helpful. I want to thank Lesley Wheeler in particular for all that she has done.

The English department at Tufts has shaped me in ways that are too profound to ever properly put into words. When I was an undergraduate student there, the faculty taught me how to read, write, and think about literature. Now theyve supported me as Ive put their lessons into practice. So thanks to all my colleagues at Tufts: Liz Ammons, Jay Cantor, Ricky Crano, John Fyler, Julia Genster, Judith Haber, Sonia Hofkosh, Joe Litvak, Lisa Lowe, Neil Miller, Modhumita Roy, Natalie Shapero, Christina Sharpe, Ichiro Takayoshi, Greg Thomas, and Michael Ullman. I cant imagine writing this book without them. John Lurz and Nate Wolff deserve special thanks for their friendship, intellectual generosity, and advice, both minor and major, along the way. Anyone who has been taught by Linda Bamber is lucky, but I am particularly lucky for all that she has imparted to me over the years. Lee Edelman has been one of the most important presences in my life. He showed me howand whywe should read literature. His support has made all of this possible.

Everyone at the University of Virginia Press deserves acknowledgement. Angie Hogan, in particular, has been one of the best editors I could imagine. She has supported this project in so many wayslarge and small, subtle but significantthat it would require an acknowledgments section longer than the actual book to thank her adequately.

My work has been supported by a generous postdoctoral fellowship at Rice Universitys Humanities Research Center and a junior faculty leave at Tufts University. I presented ideas from this book to audiences at various ASECS and NEASECS meetings, at Columbia, Harvard, Rice, Wesleyan, and the Samuel Johnson Society of the Central Region. My thanks to the participants at all these talks. Parts of the introduction and chapter 1 first appeared in ELH, volume 82, issue 4, 2015. Copyright 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. It is reprinted with permission from the journal. A few paragraphs in the introduction also appeared in Reasoning Beasts: Evolution, Cognition, Culture,17201820, edited by Kathryn Duncan (AMS Press, 2017), and they are reprinted with permission from the press. An early version of chapter 3 appeared in The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century,