Macaulay’s Paranoid Parliament: Queer Theory, Victorian Medicine, and The History of England

Abstract

Offers a reading of Macaulay’s History that lays bare a number of parallels with the late twentieth-century work of critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Believes both are responding to theories of the body that developed near the end of the eighteenth century. Argues that Macaulay actually confronts the conflicts posed by these changing notions in a more constructive way than Sedgwick does in her 1997 manifesto, “On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”.