Gay Lerature: Poetry and Prose | Oxford Rearch Encyclopedia of Lerature

Contents:

• THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF GAY AND LBIAN LERATURE
• GAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSEGAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSE
• GAY AND LBIAN STUDI

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF GAY AND LBIAN LERATURE

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lbian Lerature prents a global history of the field and is an unprecented summatn of cril knowledge on gay and lbian lerature that also addrs the impact of gay and lbian lerature on gnate fields such as parative lerature and postlonial studi.

Wrten by leadg scholars the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lbian Lerature will not only engage rears ntemporary bat but also serve as a five reference for gay and lbian lerature for years to e. Socrat would play a privileged role the receptn of Greek philosophil ias about eros morn gay lerature, but the figure celebrated those later texts is the Platonic Socrat of the Symposium and Phaeds.

In the thirty years that have passed sce the publitn of Alan Bray's landmark book Homosexualy Renaissance England, femist and queer scholars have asked and answered the qutn - how queer was the transvte theatre, a variety of ways. To approach the dialogue between the stcturg prciple of homophobia the early Gothic novel and the novel's remarkable silence on the topic of male-male sexual relatns, one mt return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's formative work Between Men.

GAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSEGAY LERATURE: POETRY AND PROSE

If The Monk offers s rears a seri of anachronistilly unrstood metonyms that n be prsed to here the legible figure of "the homosexual" Le Fanu's "Carla" offers a narrative of a young woman named Lra, who liv wh her father a remote stle the Atrian provce of Styria. SJ Sdu, thor of Marriage of a Thoand Li, lled , "One of the first Anglophone works to challenge the trope of the sad/suicidal gays who die at the end, this book gave a blueprt of what queer fictn uld look like. Forster (A Passage to India, A Room Wh a View, Howards End) wrote the benchmark gay novel Mrice cir 1913, was published posthumoly a lh tale of manners, posn, and sire, the tular character meets and falls for his classmate Clive while at Oxford.

GAY AND LBIAN STUDI

The pair embark on a two-year affair until Clive leav Mrice to marry a woman and live out his proscribed life as part of the land gentry, leavg Mrice shambl and seekg to cure his Forster's novel do not end gay tragedy. The queer g-of-age novel about Jim Willard and his search for love was the first novel om a rpected wrer (Gore Vidal) to speak directly and sympathetilly about the gay experience an era when homosexualy was still very much taboo.

The book is remembered today for this legacy as well as for var them -- Hollywood's glass closet, beg gay the ary, the poisono effects of homophobia on society -- that still reverberate today.

The only novel by the great Osr Wil may not be overtly gay, but there's plenty of gay subtext there for the reful rear - about as much gay subtext as a popular thor uld get away wh 's iends Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton exprs tense admiratn for his bety, and passag that show Basil's feelgs for Dorian as more clearly homoerotic were excised by an edor, acrdg to Nicholas Frankel, who eded an edn prentg Wil's origal text the text as origally published has referenc to Dorian's rptn of not only young women but young men: "There was that wretched boy the Guards who mted suici. Integral to the lbian non (spe s beg nsired somewhat problematic) Brish wrer Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel foc on Stephen Gordon, an upper-class lbian who dons men's clothg and be a novelist who eventually be a part of a lerary salon Paris at a time when there were no overt laws exprsly barrg homosexualy.