Kate Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
"""Postal Pleasures is innovative, authoritative, and well-written-an exemplary work in Victorian studies that skillfully integrates frameworks drawn from literary studies, cultural history, queer theory, and postcolonial studies."" --Sharon Marcus, author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England ""Traversing the busy crossroads between Victorian and queer studies, Postal Pleasures charts an exciting path through a superficially sexless bureaucracy. Thomas compellingly shows how, in the postal service, desire and selfhood are both media and mediation, and queerness less an identity than a mode of transaction. To sum it up in a phrase: ontology recapitulates philately."" --William A. Cohen, author of Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses ""Postal Pleasures is a pleasure to read, and it gains strength as it goes along, not least by introducing insightful readings of less well-known works which make us think differently about authors we thought we knew....Through her engaging, playful and convincing readings, Thomas has taken the universal and made it seem very queer, indeed."" --Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies"