Selected Publications
“Bitcoin: A Reader’s Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea), Critical Inquiry 46 (Autumn 2019), 140-166. pdf
“Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste,” Critical inquiry 45 (Spring 2019), 577-600. pdf
“The Social Organization of Schools (around 1800),” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 56:4 ( 2016), 823-843. pdf
“Now It’s Personal: D.A. Miller and Too-Close Reading,” Critical Inquiry 41:3 (Spring 2015), 521-540. pdf
“Our I.A. Richards Moment: The Machine and Its Adjustments” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 261-279.
“What Should I Do and What Was I Thinking? Philosophical examples and the Uses of the Literary,” boundary 2 (2013) 40:2, 9-23.
“Too Much Information: Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet,” MLN 125 (Winter 2010), 783-802. pdf
“Dissenting Textualism: The Claims of Psychological Method in the Long Romantic Period,” Studies in Romanticism 49 (Winter 2010), 577-599. pdf
“Generationalizing: Romantic Social Forms and the Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Partial Answers 8:1 (2010), 97-118.
“Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel,” Narrative 18:1 (January 2010), 459-451.
“Writing and Orality around 1800: ‘Speakers’, ‘Readers’, and Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’” in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience, ed. Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 119-139. pdf
“Bernard Williams and the Importance of Being Literarily Earnest,” in Reading Bernard Williams, ed. Daniel Callcut (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 189-209.
“Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text,” New Literary History, 39:3 (Summer 2008), 657-684. pdf
“The Way We Love Now: Ian McEwan, Saturday, and Personal Affection in the Information Age,” Representations 100 (Fall 2007), 42-52.
“Jacques Derrida and the Critique of the Geometrical Mode: The Line and the Point,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 2007), 312-329.
“On Terrorism and Morals: Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities,” Partial Answers III:3 (June 2005), 49-74.
“Organic Form and Its Consequences,” Land, Nation, Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, ed. Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask, and David Sipson (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 223-240.
“Emma, or Happiness (or Sex Work),” Critical Inquiry 28 (Spring 2002), 749-779.
Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61:1 (March 2000), 157-180.
“Canons, Poetic, and Social Value: Jeremy Bentham and How to Do Things with People,” MLN 110 (1995), 1148-1164. pdf
“Pornography: The Theory,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995), 670-695. pdf
“Sade and the Pornographic Legacy,” Representations 36 (Fall 1991), 1-21.
“On the Numbers of Romanticisms,” ELH 8 (1991), 471-498.
“Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth,” Diacritics (Winter 1987), 32-43.
“Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (Fall 1987), 88-112.
“Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude” in Literature and the Body: Essays from the English Institute, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 106-124.
“The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritics 14:2 (Summer 1984), 4-10.
“Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality,” Representations 6 (Spring 1984), 66-84.
“Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’: What the Mountain Said” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 202-214.
“The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or The Bathos of Experience,” Glyph 8 (1981), 62-78.
“Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” The Georgia Review 31 (Fall 1977), 617-635.
“The Lucy Poems: Wordsworth’s Quest for a Poetic Object,” ELH 40 (Winter 1973), 532-548.