Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer and scholar who focuses on 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory. His first novel, Confessions of the Fox, smashes those two disciplines together by retelling the story of two notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers: Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess, both real people who lived and breathed the fetid London air. But in Rosenberg's imagining, Jack is trans and Bess is the daughter of a South Asian sailor and an Englishwoman from the soon-to-be-drained fen. Confessions of the Fox is the title of both the novel and a long-lost manuscript that may or may not be their confessions, discovered by a scholar named Dr. Voth. He obsessively annotates the novel and presents it to us, the reader, with an introduction and footnotes that unspool into a conspiratorial tale of surveillance, resistance, and suspense. Rosenberg joins us on the podcast to talk about what it’s like to rewrite history.
Also, we have a copy of the novel to give away! So please, tell one person that you're a fan of the podcast, write us a pithy review on iTunes, and email podcast@theamericanscholar.org to tell us you’ve done so for your chance to win a copy of Confessions of the Fox. We will randomly select a winner on October 12.
Go beyond the episode:
- Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
- Proof that Jack Sheppard is, in fact, real, and not a fantastical invention: his Encyclopedia Britannica entry
- Listen to the 1958 recording of The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay
- For more about how the spectacle of capital punishment was used in the 18th century, check out Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged
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