Crayon, Looking: Washington Irving and the Queer Sublime

Abstract

The truth is, we generally make love in a style and with sentiments very unfit for ordinary life: they are half theatrical and half romantic. By this means we raise our imaginations to what is not to be expected in human life.-Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Spectator, no. 479 Whether one goes by the coinage of the word "homosexual" (typically dated to 1868), the press coverage of same-sex criminal activity, or the rise of sexology, most historians of sexuality agree that the so-called invention of the homosexual 1 occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. 2 Recently, scholars have sought prehistories and prototypes of queerness avant la lettre in ways that frequently diverge from the well-trodden path of same-sex desire. From Greta LaFleur's environmental theory of sexuality to Jen Manion's "female husbands" and C. Riley Snorton's history of Black trans identity; from Natasha Hurley's exploration of circulated queerness to Travis Foster and Timothy M. Griffiths's positioning of queer thought as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century women's writing-it now seems commonplace to accept that queerness preceded the invention of the homosexual, even if, as Peter Coviello reminds us, these experimental or ephemeral forms often failed to make the cut in terms of the homo-/heterosexual binary that crystallized by century's end. 3 Within this archive of speculative queerness, one encounters what Coviello designates as "an erotic self in the twilit moment before the arrival or