Douglas Trevor

Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture

Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, Debora K. Shuger, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, DAvid Hillman, Marjorie Garber

The Novelist and the Short Story Writer

She had written two novels by the age of twenty-seven and was known, by the time she went to the Upstart Conference in the Hills to teach, as an author of peculiar power and enviable sales numbers. Her first novel, Hand Job, was about a teenage girl in a small town who used her considerable finger dexterity as a pianist to satisfy the various adolescent boys who courted her relentlessly, until a carnival came to town and she discovered the love of her life: a transgender pony wrangler with whom she ran off at the book’s conclusion. Yes, there were some contrived elements in play here, as reviewers noted, but they also praised the way the author balanced her treatment of sexual frustration with a meticulous account of carpal tunnel syndrome. In addition, the book’s depictions of what the effects of a steady intake of high-fructose corn syrup can be on an unnamed but clearly red-state community were universally praised. “Junk food has never looked so junky,” one critic noted. Ellen’s second book, The Sodomite, detailed a fourteenth-century young nun’s affair with an abusive Dominican who offered the girl comprehensive knowledge of Scholastic philosophy in exchange for a kind of love that pretty much dared not speak its name. On the heels of this work, one reviewer enthusiastically described Ellen as “the illegitimate daughter of a carnal union between Umberto Eco and the Marquis de Sade.” Just a week before the conference was scheduled to begin, the novelist’s agent optioned the book to an Italian movie producer. The short story writer was older than Ellen: thirty-three. He smoked continuously: cigarettes he rolled himself to save money and also because he was particular about the kind of tobacco he liked. Thom wore a long beard. His hair rested on his shoulders. He was very tall and gaunt and looked and carried himself more than a little like Jesus Christ. Unlike Christ, however, Thom coughed a lot and professed to suffer from both claustrophobia and acrophobia, although in both cases he was lying. More than anything, Thom identified himself as an experimental writer. He identified himself in this manner a lot; he had to, since no one had ever heard of him before. Faculty positions at the Upstart

The Private Lives of Trees and Flowers

A mere handful of stanzas into Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Redcrosse Knight, Una, and the dwarf that lags behind them enter a “shadie groue ... Whose lof tie trees yclad with sommers pride, / Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide.”1 What imme- diately follows is the first epic catalogue of the poem, with its striking meditation on trees:

About Peter Ho Davies: A Profile

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