Queer Messianism: Modernism's Sense of a Future

"Queer Messianism: Modernism's Sense of a Future" delineates a series of literary-philosophical attempts to give the modern subject the sense of an open-ended and transformative future. Through close readings of fiction and autobiographical prose by Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and E.M. Forster, I argue for subjectivities-in-waiting whose avoidance of normative behaviors and imaginative orientations to uncertain futures allow for a range of relational experiments in the present. Elucidating feelings of hope and anticipation in modernist texts usually known for their disaffection and alienation, the project remaps modernism's affective terrain and advances a queer ethic in which gender and sexual difference inspire connections across imperial, racial, and generational divides. In opening this archive of aspiration, my dissertation also breaks with queer theory's characterization of futurity as an intrinsically heteronormative concept.;Chapter One, an investigation of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, illustrates how Wilde makes his sexual disgrace the foundational moment for a messy messianism in which negative feelings enable unexpected ethical affinities. Chapter Two argues that Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Sacred Fount design anticipatory subjectivities that glimpse the futures they simultaneously await, rendering messianism an immanent force. Chapter Three argues that E.M. Forster's "queer invitation"---the primary mode of connection in Howards End, Maurice, and A Passage to India---opens temporal paths for non-normative behaviors without deciding in advance where such paths will lead. Collectively, these three chapters constitute an effort to displace the negativity prevalent in queer and modernist studies and to restore to critical theory a viable conception of individual and collective agency.