Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meta archival meditation, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. Our subject is Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, well known and respected in the Victorian period, strangely obscure in our own. We tell of discovering Scharf's souvenirs of a social life among the highest classes, an...
While many books have been written about gay writing, this is an account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present. Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, it includes chapters on the significant periods of cultural history (the Greek and Roman civilizations, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, the American Renaissance and the 20th century), on major writers (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Proust, Wilde) and on commo...
Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women." These passages, along with other ambiguous erotic and sexual language found in the Gilgamesh epic and the biblical David story, have become the object of numerous and competing scholarly inquiries into the sexual nature o...
Eros, Logos, and Fictional Masculinity (ACTA Universitatis Upsaliensis, #101)
by Danuta Zadworna-Fjellestad and Danuta Fjellstad
The first volume of the new series "European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies" focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The articles seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe's intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism; they aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in av...
School Counselor - I'm not in it for the income, I'm in it for the outcome.
by Authorking Publishinghouse
A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history...
I Am You (Ana Hiya Anti)
by Ilham Mansur, Elham Mansour, and Ilhaam Manosaur
William S. Burroughs is consistently thought of as a novelist who is gay, rather than a gay novelist. This distinction is slight, yet remarkable, since it has meant that Burroughs has been excluded from the gay canon and from the scope of queer theory. In this book, Jamie Russell offers a queer reading of Burrough's novels. He explores how the novels of Burroughs can be seen as a sustained attempt to offer a very personal rethinking of gay subjectivity, and as an attempt to overturn stereotypes...
Edward Said is a major 20th-century thinker. His impact on the way we think about identity and postcolonialism has been profound and transformative. In this book of essays, scholars of postcolonial studies, philosophy and literary criticism, informed by Said's wide-ranging scholarship, engage with and extend his work. Robert Young, author of "White Mythologies", focuses his essay on the notion of hybridity and ethnicity in England. Benita Parry explores how a very English story of imperialism is...
Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature
by Allen Thiher
Unhistorical Shakespeare argues against the ideas of difference that underpin historicist studies of the past and its desires, offering, instead, the idea of homo-history to engage with issues of narcissism, anachronism, and recursiveness in conjunction with sexual desire.
A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader
Over the course of his brief career, Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) became an important critical voice for African American scholarship as well as a widely read chronicler of the African American gay experience. His novels Trouble the Water and Vanishing Rooms still receive considerable attention, as do his collections of poetry and his major work of criticism, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature. In A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, scholars Justin A. Joyce and D...
The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of...
In the late medieval era, pain could be a symbol of holiness, disease, sin, or truth. It could be encouragement to lead a moral life, a punishment for wrongdoing, or a method of healing. Exploring the varied depictions and descriptions of pain - from martyrdom narratives to practices of torture and surgery - "The Modulated Scream" attempts to decode this culture of suffering in the Middle Ages. Esther Cohen brings to life the cacophony of howls emerging from the written record of physicians, tor...
There are sons who grow up unhappily believing that no matter what they do, they cannot please their fathers. Often unable to shed their sense of lifelong failure, either they give up and suffer in a permanent sulk, or they try with all their might to prove they are worth something after all. These are the "loser sons," a group of historical men as varied as President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Atta. Their names quickly illustrate that not only are their problems serious, but...
Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realis...
Lesbian Configurations (Between Men - Between Women: Lesbian & Gay Studies)
by Renee Hoogland
What constitutes a lesbian text? Can there be a distinctly lesbian voice and mode of cultural critique and analysis? What is its place in relation to feminist or gay theory? These are some of the questions Renee Hoogland addresses in "Lesbian Configurations", a "state of the field" report that critically reassesses many recent developments in lesbian studies. Hoogland provides original readings of literary and cinematographic texts such as "Basic Instinct" and "Bitter Moon", "The Bell Jar" and "...