Abstract: This response to Pathologies of Motion thinks with and through the important questions Kevis Goodman's book inspires, focusing specifically on Goodman's discussion of the novel forms of volition theorized by Erasmus Darwin. Considering such volition's potential significance for female figures, poets, and readers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the response performs a close reading of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's poem "Washing Day" in order to suggest that attention to pathologies of motion may bring to light a model of mediation that, by timing intervals, may gauge the future by the disruptions of the past.
Carmen Faye Mathes (Sun,) studied this question.