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An#equal#opportunity,#affirmative#action#university#
December 16, 2013
Prof. Greg Clingham
Bucknell University Press
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA 17837
Dear Professor Clingham,
I am seeking a publisher for my book manuscript, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in
Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Many of my colleagues in eighteenth-century studies,
including Chris Mounsey and Tina Brownley, have recommended that I send this manuscript to
you.
In Making Love, I argue that eighteenth-century philosophers, essayists, and novelists
fundamentally reconceived the relations among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is my
contention that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary, posited heterosexual desire
as the precondition of moral feeling and conduct. I further suggest that sentimental writers
fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to the theories of self-love and
self-interest found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire
and its culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as the privileged means
for an individual to transcend self-love and to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts
and feelings of others. At the same time, I suggest, other pleasures and desires—such as those
rooted in friendship or same-sex eroticism—were increasingly depicted as antithetical to
conjugal love and, thus, were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. My argument
unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts, including the moral treatises of the third earl
of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, the Tatler and the Spectator, and the novels Love in
Excess, Pamela, and Tom Jones. Although these texts embody diverse rhetorical strategies and
thematic concerns, I show how they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology:
on the one hand, heterosexual desire becomes synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and
moral goodness, while on the other hand, desires that fall outside the purview of conjugal love
are pathologized as selfish withdrawals from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and
ultimately, “humanity” itself.
The majority of my book manuscript contains unpublished material. I have published two peer-
reviewed articles based on work drawn from Making Love. But I am mindful of Bucknell UP’s
guidelines regarding pre-publication, and the material that already has appeared in print
represents no more than 25% of my book manuscript. The first of these articles, “‘The Glorious
Lust of Doing Good’: Tom Jones and the Virtues of Sexuality,” appears in the journal Novel: A
Forum on Fiction (2005) and offers a shorter, earlier version of chapter 5. The second article,
“Reason, Madness, and Sexuality in the British Public Sphere,” appears in the journal The
Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2012) and presents a portion of Chapter 2.
This project began as a doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Claudia L. Johnson
and Jeff Nunokawa in the Princeton English department. However, after substantial revision as
well as the addition of new material, the manuscript of Making Love represents a significant
departure from my dissertation.
Along with this letter, I include my book proposal and CV. My proposal provides an in-depth
introduction to the project, a detailed summary of my chapters, an assessment of the project’s
audience and market competition, and a brief bibliography. The introduction and chapters 2, 3,
4, and 5 are ready for submission. I expect to complete revisions of chapter 1 by February 1,
2014.
I will be happy to answer any questions or to provide you with further information. Thank you
very much for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Paul Kelleher
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Emory University
