John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated
essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of
Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself—and of what it means to live in it.
- ISBN10 0192866931
- ISBN13 9780192866936
- Publish Date 24 November 2022
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 400
- Language English