The principal scientific achievement of this project has been a considerable refining of my theories about the origins and development of the extant figure. Originally it was my contention that such a character type signified similarly across the entire nineteenth century, always representing a dismayed awareness of temporal acceleration symptomatic of modernity itself. Through archival research, as well as collaboration with colleagues at the University of Lille, I have come to see the widely varied significations of this character type across generations—a much greater diversity of meanings than I had originally conceived. It was my postdoctoral research that suggested the structure of the book: life and afterlife. The extant figure was developed in a specific historical context, outlived that context, and subsequently became many things to many generations of writers.
Additionally, I have developed the concept of a second book project, focused on the ways that defunct scientific theories of the eighteenth century continue to influence literary culture through their enduring impact on novelistic form. This project, provisionally titled Life Forms, is an experiment in interdisciplinarity. Noting that the modern laboratory and the modern novel are both inventions of the eighteenth century, I treat the latter as a metaphysical extension of the former, and argue that novels allowed omnivorous authors like Godwin and Shelley to test the existential implications of new discoveries in the realm of biological science. To conduct these experiments, moreover, novelists changed the formal makeup of the novel in ways still visible today. It is also my contention that the laboratory, at once private and performative, can serve as a kind of metaphor for a new approach to balancing formalist and historicist preoccupations in literary criticism.
