Valerie Rohy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and the coeditor (with Elizabeth Ammons) of American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920.

"…an arresting and deeply illuminating study … Rohy's work represents a sign of life—a confirmation that queer theory still has much to teach us, and about subjects much broader than queer subjectivity." — College Literature

• AcknowledgmentsPreface: Archaic Inclinations1. Three Analogies: History, Psychoanalysis, Literature2. Douglass and Jacobs in the Future Perfect3. Local Melancholia: Jewett and Cather4. Time Lines: Hopkins’s Literary History5. A Darker Past in The Garden of Eden6. AhistoricalNotesIndex

Valerie Rohy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature and the coeditor (with Elizabeth Ammons) of American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920.

"…an arresting and deeply illuminating study … Rohy's work represents a sign of life—a confirmation that queer theory still has much to teach us, and about subjects much broader than queer subjectivity." — College Literature

• AcknowledgmentsPreface: Archaic Inclinations1. Three Analogies: History, Psychoanalysis, Literature2. Douglass and Jacobs in the Future Perfect3. Local Melancholia: Jewett and Cather4. Time Lines: Hopkins’s Literary History5. A Darker Past in The Garden of Eden6. AhistoricalNotesIndex