History's Queer Stories: Retrieving and Navigating Homosexuality in British Fiction about the Second World War

Description

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012). Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: “Never in the History of Sex was so Much Offered to so Many by so Few” “People’s Pasts [are] so Much More Interesting than Their Futures” – Re-Negotiating the Homosexual Problem Novel “We Have to Do the Things They Tell Us” – Nation, Masculinity and War “The Collapse of a Wall [...] Starts with a Few Loose Bricks” – Queering Space, Body and Time “No Sense of a Tidy Ending”: Resisting Closure Bibliography Index