Exordium
Potentiality and gesture. Revision, origin, and the courage of truth : Henry James's New York Edition prefaces
"First love" : gesture and the emergence of desire in Eudora Welty
Novels and the beginnings of character. Robinson Crusoe and the inception of speech
The clock finger at nought : Daniel Deronda and the positing of perspective
Proto-reading and the positing of character in Our mutual friend
Our stony ancestry. Ovid and Orpheus
Wallace Stevens and the temporalities of inception and embodiment
Solitude and queer origins. "Epitaph, the idiom of man" : imaginings of the beginning
Etiology, solitude, and queer incipience.