Queer Forster (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226508021 ISBN 13: 9780226508023

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1997

Synopsis

This groundbreaking volume presents a radical revision of gay criticism and focuses on E. M. Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies.

Many previous critics of Forster downplayed his homosexuality or read Forster naively in terms of gay liberation. This collection situates Forster within the Bloomsbury Group and examines his relations to major figures such as Henry James, Edward Carpenter, and Virginia Woolf. Particular attention is paid to Forster's several accounts of India and their troubled relation to the British colonial enterprise. Analyzing a wide range of Forster's work, the authors examine material from Forster's undergraduate writings to stories written more than a half-century later.

A landmark book for the study of gender in literature, Queer Forster brings the terms "queer" and "gay" into conversation, opening up a dialogue on wider dimensions of theory and allowing a major revaluation of modernist inventions of sexual identity.

About this title

From the Author

Queer, Forster?
This book is intended for both literary critics and general readers. In it, my co-editor and I try to bring the emerging field of "queer theory" (roughly, the deconstruction of sexual identity) into conversation with the writing of the early twentieth-century novelist E.M. Forster, author of A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice, and A Passage to India. What we and our contributors discover is a Forster queerer than ever before imagined, an author whose texts explore the complications of class, race, nation, gender, and sexuality in ways that are sophisticated and lucid, charming and revolutionary.Forster famously wrote in his essay "What I Believe" that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." When Forster first published these comments, in 1938, they were controversial because they placed human relations over nationalism, friendship over patriotism. Since Forster's posthumous "outing"--an "outing" that he himself arranged before his death--these sentiments have come to signify in a different register. With our more complete knowledge of Forster's homosexual relationships and friendships, we now understand that "friend" here means both "buddy" and "lover," a usage of this term found in writers from Plato to Walt Whitman. Forster here suggests that the homosexual is sometimes forced to choose between his "illegal" sexual relationships and the country that condemns them. For Forster, the homosexual is always an outlaw, often an outlaw in hiding, who exists in important ways on the margins of society. This notion of the homosexual is, we argue, pervasive in Forster's writing, not just the explicitly gay novel and stories. Queer Forster? This book invites an exploration of that question with an open mind and with a renewed sense of the multiciplicity and diversity of desire.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226508021
• ISBN 13: 9780226508023
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 316
• Editor: Martin Robert K., Piggford George