Review 19 Gives my Chapter a Rave!

There’s a splendid review of Queer Victorian Families up on Review 19, and it singles out my chapter, “The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville,” for special praise:

[T]he most outstanding piece is Alec Magnet’s beautiful and melancholic reading of Tennyson’s In Memoriam alongside Melville’s Moby Dick. Both works, of course, have prompted queer theoretical readings as well as plenty of others. But in aiming to “demonstrate their affinity, their queer, archival, literary kinship, with each other while at the same time making themselves available to generations of queer readers” (191), Magnet’s reading stunningly exemplifies a return to what reading through a queer lens originally set out to do. Magnet recalls those moments in mainstream literature where the queer reader can quietly stumble upon and gain strength from deep connections that offer a “nourishing, reparative, queer kinship” (191).

Beautiful, stunning, and melancholic — that’s how I’ve always dreamt my writing would be described! I’m so grateful to Ardel Haefele-Thomas for these kind words. And to the book’s editors, Duc Dau and Shale Preston, for including my chapter and making it so much better.

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What I Found on Project MUSE

Searching for myself on Project MUSE to find my review of Drinking History, I discovered that a paper I gave at the inaugural C19 conference in 2010 was mentioned in ESQ’s “The Year in Conferences.” You have to log in to see the whole thing, but all it says about me is:

In “Camp Encyclopedias and Reparative Imaginings in Moby-Dick,” Alec Magnet used the reparative reading theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the object relations theory of Melanie Klein to explore Ishmael’s “campy” descriptive exuberance in Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s “omniscient exhaustiveness” attempts to defer the void represented by the white whale, modeling vitality and appreciation despite the terror and death ever present on the Pequod.

My Review of “Drinking History” Is Out

My review of Andrew F. Smith’s Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages has just come out in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 111.2. The Register is one of the oldest historical journals in the U.S., and I’m excited to appear in it. Read on Project MUSE or as a PDF.