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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
  • Cited by 1
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139547376
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139547376
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature: General Interest, Literary Theory
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 20 - “This Sudden Silence”: A Brief History of the Literature of Caribbean Women Who Love Women
    pp 363-377
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From a contemporary standpoint, quite a few nineteenth-century authors might appear gay or lesbian, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Walt Whitman, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Another group of lesser-known authors include Theodore Winthrop, Elizabeth Stoddard and Margaret Mussey Sweat. Anxiety over more rigid definitions of manhood led to more definite distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual men, the intimacies and rhetoric of "romantic friendship" becoming the exclusive property of the latter. As homosexuality became a legal, medical, and psychological category, it came to characterize not individual acts, but a type of personality, the homosexual, whose sexuality was innate, fundamental, and legible in every aspect of the homosexual's life. Romantic same-sex friendships were often perceived as socially transformative, yet often they strained under the tension between reform and self-interested prejudice, especially when those friendships formed across the color line. Racial differences both intensify and undermine friendship's potential for libratory social change.
  • 21 - Modernist Poetry
    pp 378-401
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The African presence in the United States and the construction of American black identity has a history of being sexualized. From this perspective, writing about racialization has often meant writing about sexual relations. Increasingly, scholars have drawn attention not simply to the sexualization of the black body, but also to the historical construction of sexual desire in the writings of African Americans. This chapter explores the representation of same-sex desire as well as the emergence of transgressive ideas about sexuality in these writings. It considers African American writing and cultural expression from the antebellum period until 1930. The chapter outlines the significance of representations of nonnormative sexuality in African American expressive culture that become the context for late twentieth-century works by self-identified gay and lesbian artists. Critical treatments have consistently shown that the logic of enslavement was perverse not simply in the abuse and misuses of power but in the sexual dynamics it encouraged and even required.
  • 23 - Russian Gay and Lesbian Literature
    pp 421-437
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Marcel Proust's book is inhabited by many books, but the most important one is a vast essay on Eros. His materials are relationships between men and women, as in Swann in Love. In using the term sexual inversion, Proust alluded to a notion that was common enough at the time, namely that homosexual males were "inverted men". Homosexuality was felt by many to be a violation of the law of God and the law of Nature, even an affront to the mental health of the nation. In the circles in which Proust moved, especially as a young man, many people understood perfectly well that he had close relationships with men. But he wanted at all costs to avoid being labeled a "homosexual". A striking feature of Proust's novel is perhaps not that it pays a great deal of attention to male homosexuality but rather its passionate interest in lesbianism.
  • 24 - Spanish Literature in the Long Twentieth Century, 1898–2007
    pp 438-458
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the literature of Caribbean women who love women somewhere between the silenced and the loud-spoken, between the invisible and the high-profile: by offering a close reading of two incandescent, almost-forgotten examples of early twentieth-century Caribbean poetry. The first is an anonymous song composed by working-class Creole women in Suriname. The second is another poem written to be set to music but never performed. In working-class Paramaribo, Creole women in relationships with women engaged in ritual performances that publicized their desires. These performances included lavish birthday parties lovers threw for each other, with songs, dances, and staged fights. Haitian-born poet Ida Faubert, who, unlike the mati, seemed the kind of elite woman writer poised to enter literary history. Faubert was redefining herself as a newly independent woman at a time when female same-sex relationships were emerging as an increasingly visible option to compulsory heterosexuality in Paris.
  • 25 - French and Francophone Literature
    pp 459-476
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The exact chronological and geographical boundaries of modernism and modernity are matters of long-standing critical dispute. This chapter makes no pretense to retheorize them, but rather, works within a widely accepted framework for what constitutes the modernist period, from mid-nineteenth-century France to the beginning of the Second World War. The scope is limited to French, German, and English poetry written in Western Europe and the United States. The chapter deals with German modernism by focusing on Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. It considers Hart Crane's reaction to the high modernist aesthetic and Amy Lowell's fraught interaction with it. The chapter examines the American avatars of what has come to be known as "international" or "high" modernism, by exploring HD Ezra Pound, and TS Eliot. It looks at the Harlem Renaissance poetry of Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Finally, the chapter discusses the British modernism of DH Lawrence and WH Auden.
  • 26 - African Literatures
    pp 477-497
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The secular eighteenth century makes a nation-state, promulgated through literacy and print, a substitute for a shared religious identity. Both separately and combined, queerness and cosmopolitanism combat the assumed naturalness of nation and heterosexuality and expose them as constructs and nonidentities. By virtue of their shared stubbornness, the two concepts pose a challenge to the twin fictions of nationhood and heteronormativity. The shapes that family, desire, and gender take in world diasporas undermine the perceived normalcy of procreative heterosexuality, which, in turn, has served as the foundation and guardian of the nation-state. Like queer cosmopolitanism of years past, queer diaspora studies enters into an adversarial relationship with nationalism and is vocally resistant to imperialism. The theoretical and literary output by the queers of color introduces experiences of world travelers, who, through multiple cultural and political affiliations and complexity of familial affinities, expand cosmopolitanism beyond the "first world".
  • 28 - The Crucible of Space, Time, and Words: Female Same-Sex Subjectivities in Contemporary Chinese-Language Contexts
    pp 512-528
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of gay and lesbian literature in Russia is closely tied to the troubled evolution of Russian erotic culture as a whole. The enormous gap between the literary culture of Russia's educated elite and the oral culture of the folk shaped the evolution of gay literature in fundamental ways. The relationship of homosexuality to Russian cultural citizenship is a theme that runs throughout the history of Russian gay and lesbian literature. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, Russian culture began to turn away from the serious, socially engaged realism of the previous decades. A sophisticated art-for-art's sake aesthetic emerged, presaging the explosion of artistic innovation in the first two decades of the twentieth century, referred to as the Silver Age of Russian literature. Early post-Soviet gay and lesbian fiction reflected an enduring ambivalence on the part of Russian gays and lesbians themselves toward homosexuality as a native phenomenon.
  • 29 - Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics
    pp 529-547
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Periods of flourishing and repression of lesbian and gay literature in Spain during the long twentieth century are intimately tied to the country's significant political upheavals and severe censorship of all expressions of sexual desire, but particularly of same-sex sexual practices. Important characteristic of Spanish culture to keep in mind is the profound impact that the nation's primary identity as a Catholic country had on it until the early years of the democracy. The period before the Civil War was marked by a flourishing literary culture so remarkable that critics call it La Edad de Plata, echoing the famed early modern literary apogee of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, La Edad de Oro of Cervantes's El Quijote. During the Civil War, on the Republican side, women acquired many rights and engaged in endeavors previously considered masculine, while men fought at the front. Franco's long dictatorship repressed nonnormative sexualities and halted all gender experimentation.
  • 30 - Native American Literatures
    pp 548-569
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the intricate relations among canonical French literature and postcolonial writings to articulate some of the lingering effects of orientalism in contemporary French and Francophone cultures. It provides a short discussion of AIDS narratives, which serves to underline the tensions between body as scientific object and body as literary object, while evaluating issues of aesthetics, and their limits, associated with AIDS-related representations. The chapter outlines the contours of post-queer expressions of same-sex erotic desires, romantic relationships, and inventive forms of affective investments. Representations from a homoerotic perspective of social and sexual interrelations in the context of ethnic differences have sometimes summoned the Orientalist ghosts of cinematically objectified racial bodies. Finally, the chapter describes the context of French queer theory, the specificities of postcolonial and national identity issues as they relate to sexual practices, as well as radical or progressive politics.
  • 31 - African American and African-Diasporic Writing, Post-1930
    pp 570-586
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The question of African homophobia/homosexuality is increasingly significant on a global terrain. The question of exactly how African this homophobia is has been posed in recent years with some force. In the 1990s, the most widely publicized instances of homophobic discourse and action were generated by the pronouncements of leaders such as Presidents Mugabe and Nujoma of Zimbabwe and Namibia. Africa has a vast and wide-ranging corpus of oral poetry and narrative, sometimes referred to as "traditional literature". Representations of same-sexual activity, desire, or identity often stage more than themselves in the South African literature of the 1980s and '90s, most often racial struggle and shame. Silence, taboo, and gossip are practices that confound the discussion of sexuality in Africa. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing the work of contemporary African novelists: Calixthe Beyala, Jude Dibia, and Frieda Ekotto.
  • 32 - Queer Poetry in the Long Twentieth Century
    pp 589-606
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines five contexts together with their associated gender terminologies, in order to pursue how same-sex-desiring subjects forge themselves in the crucible of words, space, and time in Chinese-speaking contexts. The five contexts, namely, the theatre, the bar, the school, the movement, and the family. In the Chinese literary imagination, the world of banquets, vocal performance, and operatic theatre is most reliably associated with the representation of sexuality. In contemporary Chinese fiction, the school romance continues to be haunted by the relative perfection of the love between the young women and the disappointments of marriage and motherhood. The abolition of the polygynous household and a range of associated social identities constituted a major site for the institution of Chinese modernity throughout the twentieth century. The legitimacy of new state regimes was consolidated under the new protocol of a monogamous heteronormativity.
  • 33 - Lesbian and Gay Drama
    pp 607-625
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Applied to Mesoamerican history and worldviews, revisionist mythmaking functions as an innovative, transformational practice that queers normative stories in various ways. The various ways include: retelling a well-known mythic story from different points of view, rewriting the story by altering the plot and revising the story itself and writing new stories. While Mesoamerican-inspired revisionist mythmaking often focuses on individual and collective identity related issues, at its most innovative, these recursive uses of "Mesoamerica" produce new ontologies, epistemologies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. This chapter examines these philosophical contributions as they occur within three complex, recurring Mesoamerican-inflected themes: Aztlan, mestizaje, and cosmic mythic figures. Referencing Aztlan and an indigenous "Azteca" identity, Chicano nationalists redefined mestizaje in positive ways, reclaiming their indigenous ancestry while downplaying or entirely ignoring their European-Spanish roots. The cosmologies of the Maya, Toltecs, Olmecs, and other pre-Conquest Mesoamerican peoples were peopled by rich, complicated divinities who defy easy categorization.
  • 34 - Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction in English
    pp 626-642
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The rise of a recognized body of queer Native American (US) and Aboriginal (Canadian) literatures occurs in the wake of two concurrent political moments rarely spoken of together - the post-Stonewall movement for gay rights and the Red Power era of Native activism. This chapter describes the historical emergence of queer Native literature in the 1970s. Queer Native fiction, like drama and the early women of color anthologies, emerges in the 1980s. Such fiction varies widely in its depiction of Indigenous experiences, ranging from tribal trickster narratives to representations of urban alienation. The first Native novel with a queer Indigenous protagonist is Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Although fiction, especially full-length fiction, garners a lion's share of public attention, poetry functions as the cornerstone of the queer Native literary canon. The connections between and among the queer Native women writers can be seen in the common themes and also, at times, style of their work.
  • 35 - Autobiography
    pp 643-659
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter combines black sexual minorities to the history of African American and African diasporic writing. The longing between men that presumably structures much within modern art and culture is not mediated by a female cipher. Instead, as Huey Newton suggests himself, the extreme pressure that attends African and African American subjectivity tends to obviate the need to deny the key role that the queer subject must necessarily play in the production and reproduction of culture. Following the lead of lesbian writers, black gay men began in the 1980s to produce small literary magazines that provided room for emerging artists to experiment and develop their craft. Most important of all was the anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. This ambitious work had a number of key accomplishments. The anthology helped to articulate a long tradition of black gay writing that extended from the Harlem Renaissance to the tail end of the twentieth century.
  • 37 - Gay Male and Lesbian Pulp Fiction and Mass Culture
    pp 677-694
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter attempts a reparative telling of queer poetic history. It traces how the North American poetry has imagined, and has rendered imaginable, transformations of self and community. The chapter describes four topoi and representative poets that help illustrate poetry's subjunctive historicity: Queer Identification, Queer Influence, Queer Resistance, and Queer Horizons. Romantic outlawry stretches back to French nineteenth-century visionary Arthur Rimbaud, who influenced later queer verse like that of sex worker and thief Jean Genet. Such queer poetic resistance need not be reduced to romantic individualism, though. Indeed, Jean Genet's and Allen Ginsberg's work serves as reminders that social and juridico-legal institutions mandate sexual and gender outliers' marginalization. The dream, memory, and futurity di Prima writes about are the building blocks of poetry's subjunctive history. Instead of disclosing a particular truth or prescribing a course of action, poetry trains readers to see the world differently, queerly.
  • 38 - Childhood Studies: Children’s and Young Adult Literatures
    pp 695-711
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Performance plays an integral part in creating and sustaining queer public cultures, serving as a method of artistic inquiry, a mode of sexual expression, and a means of social protest. Gay theatres provided increasing opportunities for male playwrights, but they were generally much less receptive to plays by and about lesbians. The question of whether lesbian sexuality and dyke modes of humor can be made intelligible to broader audiences has preoccupied artists and activists since the earliest days of second wave feminism. The first AIDS drama to win a Pulitzer Prize was Tony Kushner's epic two-part saga, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. This daring theatrical experiment about life during the Reagan regime was one of the defining cultural events of the twentieth century. Lesbians, queers of color, and transgender artists often find themselves marginalized and lacking cultural capital, as racial distinctions and gender identifications continue to exert a profound effect on visibility and an artist's viability.
  • 39 - AIDS Literatures
    pp 712-732
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Queer characters became increasingly visible in literary fiction, taking starring roles in novels by a range of writers, including Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Angus Wilson, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Jane Rule, and Maureen Duffy. From the 1950s, a range of fiction and nonfiction books on queer subjects were available as cheap paperbacks. After 1970, gay and lesbian fiction has been constituted as a genre. Queer fiction since Stonewall, in its heterogeneity, has reflected the heterogeneity of queer identities, culture, and politics. The most challenging of 1970s lesbian novels, Bertha Harris's Lover, assembles a fantastical cast of magical women. Over the next two decades American gay male fiction transformed itself from a field of isolated figures to a crowded scene. Queer identities are accommodated in a world more tolerant than that portrayed in radical fiction of the post-Stonewall period.

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