Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel

Description

A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences. Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 PROLOGUE: On the Queer Worlds of Books......Page 10 INTRODUCTION: Circuits, Lies, and the Queer Novel in America......Page 20 1 Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee......Page 60 2 The Stoddard Archive and Its Dissed Contents......Page 98 3 Type Complication and Literary Old Maids......Page 128 4 Reading The Bostonians’s History of Sexuality from the Outside In......Page 168 5 Worlds Inside: Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century Types......Page 208 CODA: Short Circuits and Untrodden Paths......Page 242 Acknowledgments......Page 256 Notes......Page 262 A......Page 320 B......Page 321 C......Page 322 D......Page 323 F......Page 324 G......Page 325 H......Page 326 I......Page 327 L......Page 328 M......Page 329 N......Page 330 P......Page 331 R......Page 333 S......Page 334 T......Page 336 W......Page 338 Z......Page 339