This book had its beginning some years ago when, confronted by the lingering authority of T. S. Eliot's poetry and prose, I wondered where he went wrong – that is, where he strayed from his stated purposes. In the course of my research I discovered an early poem, “Ode,” which Eliot had suppressed, that opened a series of doors for me onto the vagrant tendencies of his work as a whole and that offered an entirely different view of Anglo-American modernism. It became clear that his creative and critical works were engaged in a struggle against identifications and desires that he considered perverse yet that found symptomatic expression within his own texts. Subsequent investigation of the writings of James Joyce and Marcel Proust led me to ask the questions to which this book is the answer. I wondered how our understanding of canonical male modernist authors and of so-called high modernism would be different if we were to examine the ways in which their texts swerve from their explicit or implicit intentions. What if the errant elements in their works were given a central place in the assessment of their position as the defining authors of modern literature? How would Eliot, Joyce, and Proust appear if we viewed them in terms of the ways in which they go astray; specifically, how would they look when seen through the lens of the gender anxieties and homosexual desires that pervade their works, yet which they displaced or disavowed?