Eighteenth-Century Literary Fragments: Queering the Fiction of “Finished” Work

Abstract

One of the most accepted fictions in literature is that a work will, at some point in its existence, be completed. In this essay, we queer that assumption, challenging its tenets through examining taxonomies and eighteenth-century categorizations alongside Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1797; published 1816), John Keats’s Hyperion (1820), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as well as other unfinished literary works of the long eighteenth century. We argue for the rereading of fragmented and unfinished work as a method of pluriversality and refusal of a singular, monumental, fixed and finished text. By accepting that the finished/unfinished binary of work is not true to creative processes, we refuse the fiction of finished work and argue to elevate those myriad fragmentary works that are currently considered critically inferior.