The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature /
edited by Scott Herring, Indiana University.
- xxiv, 248 pages ; 23 cm.
- Cambridge Companions to Literature .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Machine generated contents note: 1. Queer novelties Michael Cobb; 2. Queer theater and performance Sean Metzger; 3. Queer poetry, between 'as is' and 'as if' Eric Keenaghan; 4. Writing queer lives: autobiography and memoir Julie Avril Minich; 5. Queer cinema, queer writing, queer criticism Lucas Hilderbrand; 6. Nineteenth-century queer literature Travis Foster; 7. Literary and sexual experimentalism in the interwar years Daniela Caselli; 8. The Cold War closet Michael P. Bibler; 9. The time of AIDS and the rise of 'post-gay' Guy Davidson; 10. Gender and sexuality L. H. Stallings; 11. Intersections of race, gender, and sexuality: queer of color critique Kyla Wazana Tompkins; 12. Psychoanalytic literary criticism of gay and lesbian American literature Judith Roof; 13. Post-structuralism: originators and heirs Melissa Jane Hardie; 14. Transnational queer imaginaries, intimacies, insurgencies Martin Joseph Ponce.
"This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States"-- "Writing anything definitive about the queer American novel will always be unsatisfying, if not impossible. Unsatisfying, because the romances they contain are uncertain and, quite often, doomed: heartbreak, violence, and persecution pepper nearly every page. Impossible, because the genre's terrain is as vast and uncertain as America itself: the spaces, the characters, plots, ideas, and dynamics - too varied. The minute you say one thing, you could say another. And perhaps that might be the point. As one character from Djuna Barnes's lesbian novel Nightwood puts it, "With an American anything can be done.'"1 We could say the same about the queer American novel. If there is anything consistently connecting this genre, it is that it features, however obliquely, the effects characters (usually American, but not always) have as they seek reasons for why they have sexual feelings for those that are not obvious or traditional object choices. Frequently, these effects instruct characters in their pursuit of self-knowledge and self-understanding, especially if others have pathologized their desires (and America has and does pathologize its queers). In her autobiographical graphic memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel tells a story of a variety of discoveries that books, explicitly queer or not, can inspire. During the same afternoon when she acknowledges that she is a "lesbian," she also finds herself asking a professor to let her take his course on James Joyce's Ulysses - her father's favorite book. As we move from the captions and the meticulous, stylized drawings, canonical books acquire an increasingly important role: books become guides to how Bechdel will affect "a convergence" with her "abstracted father.""--