Love Between Women, Love Between Men
This text presents an array of writings on same-sex love from 2000 years of Indian literature. Translated from over a dozen languages and drawn from Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and modern secular traditions, these writings testify to the flourishing of same-sex love in various forms since ancient times, without overt persecution. This collection defies both stereotypes of Indian culture and Foucault's definition of homosexuality as a 19th-century invention, uncovering instead complex discourses of...
While homosexual men are legion in the history of French literature and criticism, until now no critic writing in French or English has given the same sort of attention to lesbians. Waelti-Walters covers two hundred years of fiction, beginning with the publication of Diderot's The Nun in 1796 and ending with present-day lesbian writers Jocelyne Francois, Mireille Best, Helene de Monferrand, and the authors connected to Genevieve Pastre's lesbian publishing house. While she deals with renowned au...
A Spiritual Bloomsbury is an exploration of how three English writers-Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood-sought to come to terms with their homosexuality by engagement with Hinduism. Copley reveals how these writers came to terms with their inner conflicts and were led in the direction of Hinduism by friendship or the influence of gurus. Tackling the themes of the guru-disciple relationship, their quarrel with Christianity, relationships with their mothers and the problema...
Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance. Starting with the question of how and why readers seek trace...
Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans looks at the early modern theatre through the lens of obscure and obscene puns-especially 'queer' puns, those that carry homoerotic resonances and speak to homoerotic desires. In particular, it resurrects the operations of a small boys' company known as the first Whitefriars, which performed for about nine months in 1607-8. As a group, the plays performed by this company exhibit an unusually dense array of bawdy puns, whose eroticism is extremely interesting, give...
Modernism, Sex, and Gender (New Modernisms)
by Celia Marshik and Allison Pease
Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women’s contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such wri...
"I hope I shan't meet you one day in Piccadilly with a painted face, just because you must have linen sheets" A beautiful young man is forced to choose between the love of his fiancee and the lifestyle of his male mentor. This is the infamous comedy of manipulation that, in 1934, made a leading Broadway star of Laurence Olivier, opposite his then-wife Jill Esmond. The Green Bay Tree (1933) was a scandalous hit in the West End and on Broadway.
Up from Invisibility (Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies) (Between Men~Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies)
by Larry Gross
A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variet...
The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian culture, marking a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the importance of this cultural moment, previous studies often reductively distort our reading of the formation of early twentieth-century lesbian identit...
Adolphe Belot was the envy of his contemporaries Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert: his books, unlike theirs, were best-sellers. He specialized in popular fiction that provided readers with just the right mix of salaciousness and propriety. (Under the initials A. B. he dispensed entirely with propriety.) The sensational Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (published in 1870 with a preface by Zola) tells of the suffering of a naive young man whose new bride will not agree to consummate the marriage. Eve...
Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical pr...