Aaron Hanlon

Education

D.Phil., Oxford
M.A., Dartmouth
B.A., M.A., Bucknell

Areas of Expertise

British literature c. 1600-1815

The Enlightenment in Britain

Philosophy of fiction

Early modern history and philosophy of science

US and transatlantic literature to 1815

Personal Information

My research takes the history of British literature from roughly 1600-1815 as a basis for understanding how we frame and organize knowledge and how fact, fiction, and inference work together in the various types of writing we have called “literature”: not only fiction and poetry, but also scientific atlases, political pamphlets, correspondences, and travelogues. I bring literature (broadly defined) into conversation with history and philosophy, particularly the history and philosophy of science. I treat the works of literature I study mainly as discursive documents of ideas that tell us useful things about history, philosophy, science, and political theory.

Publications (peer-reviewed) 

Books

A World Of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2019)

Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 (with Kristin Girten) (Bucknell University Press, 2023)

Journal Articles

Quixotic Influence and the Underhill Legacy in The Algerian Captive Comparative American Studies 9.2 (2011): 119-30

Re-Reading Gulliver as Quixote: Toward a Theory of Quixotic Exceptionalism Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 21.2-3 (2012): 278-303

Gender-Class Kyriarchy in The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.1 (2014): 77-96

Toward a Counter-Poetics of Quixotism Studies in the Novel 46.2 (2014): 141-58

Margaret Cavendish’s Anthropocene Worlds New Literary History 47.1 (2016): 49-66

Quixotism as Global Heuristic: Atlantic and Pacific Diasporas Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 46 (2017): 49-62

Perlocutionary Verse in Augustan England Modern Philology 114.3 (2017): 657-79

Fanny Hill and the Legibility of Consent English Literary History 86.4 (2019): 941-66

Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year Digital Defoe: Studies of Defoe and His Contemporaries 14.1 (2022)

Sense and Sensibility as Social-Epistemic System (forthcoming) Studies in the Novel 55.2 (2023)

From Writing Lives to Scaling Lives in Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography (forthcoming) The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 62.3-4 (2023)

Explanation Beyond Interpretation (forthcoming) Philosophy and Literature

Book Chapters

Teaching Literature in the Age of Trump in Trumping Ethical Norms, eds. L. Sandy Maisel and Hannah Dineen (Routledge, 2018)

Disambiguating “Critical Theory” in Liberalism and Socialism: Enemies or Kin?, ed. Matthew McManus (Palgrave, 2021) 

Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land in A Clubbable Man, ed. Anthony Lee (Bucknell University Press, 2022) 

Comedy versus Satire in Eighteenth-Century Contexts in Teaching Comic Texts, ed. Beverly Hogue (MLA Options for Teaching, 2023)

Defoe and Censorship (forthcoming) in Daniel Defoe in Context, eds. George Justice and Albert Rivero (Cambridge University Press)

Literary Technologies of the Sextant in Eighteenth-Century Britain (forthcoming) in Histories of Science, eds. David Alff and Danielle Spratt (University of Virginia Press)

The Ends of Literary Studies (forthcoming) in The Ends of Knowledge, eds. Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy (Bloomsbury, 2023)