In their public and private writings, lesbian poets Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and Amy Levy reflected the greater freedoms, including university education and physical mobility, of the New Woman. They travelled in Germany and Switzerland for professional development, aesthetic stimulation, and leisure. Europe as an aesthetic theatre underwrote new poems and provided imaginative stimuli for Michael Field, but they also moved from Anglocentric to Anglo-German perspectives and ethnoexocentrism during extended stays in Germany, when they also enhanced their German skills. The private writings of Amy Levy and Michael Field both mention the sexual danger that could accompany foreign travel. Katharine Bradley’s The New Minnesinger (1875) also shared interests in translation with Levy. Levy began translating German poets while attending Newnham College, Cambridge; Germany and German language became most closely associated for her with Heine and the Jewish identity she shared with him. Her travels additionally inspired minor short fiction susceptible to normative or queer readings. Queer sexuality also informs poems she inscribed to Vernon Lee, whom she loved; this cluster also reflects Levy’s in-depth cultural exchange with the poetry of Heine.

This essay attends to representations of sexual themes and desires in Caribbean Literatures. It traces the emergence and development of a body of writings that propel both a sense and a politics of place while enacting epistemological and ontological ruptures of the Judeo-Western heteronorms that often frame Caribbean discourses and narratives. We argue that through their particular literary remittances of plural sexual subjectivity to the public archive of Caribbean historical memory, these writers engage in a shared advocacy for the interrogation, removal and dismantling of heteronormativity as the defining framework for contemporary Caribbean discourse. The expansive politics of this writing also shifts the thematic focus away from dominant depictions of Anglophone homophobia and Hispanophone ‘machismo’ to the multiple significances of women’s erotic agencies within the quotidian; the irruptions of transgender and gender nonconforming subjectivities; the performance poetics of transvestism and cross-dressing; and the passionate corporeal reversals of Antillean carnival and masquerade.

The epilogue ponders how the media reorientations that vexed Central and South Asian travelers to pre-1857 Britain sedimented over time, exposing an impotency latent in the discursive power formation now known as orientalism. The classic case study is James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, which I interpret as satires against the English dandies and damsels who adopted Persian dress and demeanor to display social exclusivity rather than against Iranians like Abul Hassan Khan: the Persian ambassador whom Morier hosted in England in 1809–1810 and 1819. The ambassador’s queering in the English news circuit prompted Morier, a social climber anxious to claim masculine gentility, to project Londoners’ transculturation in Qajar fashions onto an Iran wallowing in Regency effeminacy – the Anglo-Persian dandy whose uncertain sexual orientation recoils on the British empire’s homosocial gentlemen.

This chapter examines the reception of Decadence in Britain by focusing on responses to the poet Paul Verlaine. For many Anglophone readers Verlaine epitomized Decadence, but comment upon his work is hedged by euphemism and ambiguity. I argue that this reflects the ‘queer’ resonance of Decadence for British readers, encompassing Verlaine’s status as a homosexual poet and, more generally, the power of Decadent writing to question and unsettle received knowledge (including sexual norms). The chapter traces the origins of the term ‘Decadence’ through classical historiography to the work of Charles Baudelaire and its transition across the Channel in the 1890s, as writers including Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, John Gray and Michael Field absorbed the influence of Baudelaire’s literary successors, J. K. Huysmans and Verlaine, into their own work. Symons’ description of Decadence as a ‘new and beautiful and interesting disease’ helpfully draws together what British readers found so appealing and so disturbing about Decadence – its continental origins, its association with various kinds of transgression and its capacity to revitalize clichéd ways of thinking.