Christopher Lane is the Pearce Miller Research Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of four books, most recently Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale University Press, 2007, 2008). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, International Herald Tribune, and New Statesman and Society, and he has published articles in journals such as Raritan, Novel, Victorian Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Common Knowledge, and the Oxford Literary Review. Forthcoming, with Yale University Press, is Failing Gods: A Century of Doubt, from which his essay is excerpted.
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