Claire Jarvis

I study British literature of the long nineteenth century with emphasis on the novel and theories of sexuality. My first book, Exquisite Masochism: Sex, Marriage and the Novel Form will be published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in Spring of 2016. In it, I use lenses developed from sexuality studies to consider the body's necessity to the novel, an approach that demonstrates the limitations of a critical discourse focused on the deep, interiorized subjectivity of the novel's characters and on symptomatic readings of the marriage plot's conservative impulses.

The readings in my book, centered on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and D. H. Lawrence's Brangwen novels, trace the effects of what I call "exquisite" masochism on the idea of sexual and romantic partnership as it develops in the realist novel. This term foregrounds the suspension of sexual satisfaction, the orchestration of scenes of humiliation with meticulously managed performances and reveals limits of both the Victorian "marriage plot" and contemporary criticism thereof.

I am interested in intersections between popular culture and intellectual life, and the status of the novel in narrative studies.  I have recently presented or published work on Jeff Koons, Charles Dickens, The Wire, D. H. Lawrence, Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, Tom McCarthy and E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy.  I am currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled The Victorian Past of Literary Fiction, which analyzes 20th and 21st century literature's uses of nineteenth century poetic, novelistic and aesthetic theories.