The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

Chapter 3 examines how medical formulae for ‘preparations of the bark’ traversed Atlantic societies over the late 1700s, and early 1800s – through practitioners’ and sufferers’ exposure to the written word, medical practice, or word of mouth. The chapter argues that methods for arranging and administering the bark had by that time coalesced into identifiable formulae – ‘bittersweet’ ‘febrifugal lemonades’, and ‘aromatic’ ‘compound wines of the bark’, most notably – that would have been familiar, and ‘agreeable’ to men and women the Atlantic World over: home-made in a Lima household, available from an Italian apothecary and popular at the Moroccan court. The chapter contends that these formulae, though they commonly exhibited structural similarities in the composition, also accommodated a measure of variability. Indeed, medical practitioners tinkered with their particulars, subtly adapting them to the sufferers’ palate, creed or means, in ways that would frequently have accounted for these preparations’ prevalence and appeal.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.