Product Description: "Oscillations of Literary Theory" offers a new psychoanalytic approach to reading literature queerly, one that implicates queer theory without depending on explicit representations of sex or queer identities. By focusing on desire and identifications, A...read more

Product Description: Queer Returns returns us to the scene of multiculturalism, diaspora and queer through the lens of black expression, identity and the political. The essays question what it means to live in a multicultural society, how diaspora impacts identity and culture and how the categories of queer and black and black queer complicate the political claims of multiculturalism, diaspora and queer politics...read more

Product Description: In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...read more

Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.  

Product Description: Houses, Secrets, and the Closet investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th- and 19th-century fiction. It focuses on close readings of Gothic and sensation novels, as well as tales by Henry James...read more

Product Description: Examining the development of gay American fiction and providing an essential reading list, this literary survey covers 257 works--novels, novellas, a graphic story cycle and a narrative poem--in which gay and bisexual male characters play a major role...read more

Using queer theory to untangle all types of nonnormative sexual identities, Tison Pugh uses Chaucer’s work to expose the ongoing tension in the Middle Ages between an erotic culture that glorified love as an ennobling passion and an anti-erotic religious and philosophical tradition that denigrated love and (perhaps especially) its enactments. Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages considers the many ways in which anti-eroticisms complicate the conventional image of Chaucer. With chapters addressing such topics as mutual masochism, homosocial brotherhood, necrotic erotics, queer families, and the eroticisms of Chaucer’s God, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms will forever change the way readers see the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other masterpieces.   For Chaucer, erotic pursuits establish the thrust and tenor of many of his narratives, as they also expose the frustrations inherent in pursuing desires frowned upon by the religious foundations of Western medieval culture. One cannot love freely within an ideological framework that polices sexuality and privileges the anti-erotic Christian ideals of virginity and chastity, yet loving queerly creates escapes from social structures inimical to amour and its expressions in the medieval period. Thus Chaucer is not just England’s foundational love poet, he is also England’s foundational queer poet.

Product Description: Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams’s work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period...read more

Product Description: Keith Hale, editor of Friends & Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, here examines the bowdlerization of Brooke in existing biographies and looks into the poet's self-proclaimed bisexual identity...read more

Product Description: Keith Hale, editor of Friends & Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, here examines the bowdlerization of Brooke in existing biographies and looks into the poet's self-proclaimed bisexual identity...read more

Product Description: This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies...read more

Product Description: Ode to Boy is an extensive collection of literature devoted to same-sex attraction from the ancient Greeks through the war poets. This volume is perfect for gay literature courses or for the casual reader. The volume includes works by Homer, Solon, Sappho, Anacreon, Theognis, Pindar, Plato, Xenophon, Callimachus, Meleager, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Petronius, Plutarch, Ovid, Aelian, Strato, Agathius, Rumi, Hafiz, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anna Seward, James Silk Buckingham, Lord Byron, Disraeli, Gogol, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Bayard Taylor, Ernst Haeckel, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Stanley Lane-Poole, Wilde, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Housman, Cather, Stein, Thomas Mann, Renee Vivien, Forster, D...read more

Product Description: Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize “Outstanding. One of the best examinations of the dissonance between official sexual ideologies and actual social and cultural practices I have had the pleasure of reading...read more

Product Description: A collection of romantic poems Byron wrote for John Edleston, Lord Clare, Earl Delawarr, Lucas Chalandrutsanos, and other boys. The collection spans Byron's life. Some poems for Edleston, Clare, and Delawarr were among the earliest verse he wrote; the poems to Chalandrutsanos were his very last...read more

Product Description: Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood...read more

Product Description: Throughout history the poetic muse has tended to be (a passive) female and the poet male. This dynamic caused problems for late Victorian and twentieth-century women poets; how could the muse be reclaimed and moved on from the passive role of old? Parker looks at fin-de-siècle and modernist lyric poets to investigate how they overcame these challenges and identifies three key strategies: the reconfiguring of the muse as a contemporary instead of a historical/mythological figure; the muse as a male figure; and an interchangeable poet/muse relationship, granting agency to both...read more

Product Description: Were David and Jonathan 'gay' lovers? This very modern question lies behind the recent explosion of studies of the David and Jonathan narrative. Interpreters differ in their assessment of whether 1 and 2 Samuel offer a positive portrayal of a homosexual relationship...read more

Product Description: In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period...read more

Product Description: In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnées," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world...read more