Queer Gothic - Softcover

Haggerty, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252073533 ISBN 13: 9780252073533

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2006

Synopsis

Discovering gothic fiction

About this title

Review

"An important book. . . . Haggerty leads the way in redirecting our gaze towards where there is an absence of love between men rather than the suspicion of sex between them, where we find that Gothic writing is queer."--Gothic Studies

 

"Compellingly makes the case for gothic fiction's function as an indispensable resource for representations of queer sexuality and identity formation."--Journal of the History of Sexuality

Synopsis

Because gothic fiction was the one semi-respectable genre that regularly explored sexual and social transgressions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, George Haggerty's "Queer Gothic" argues that it makes sense to consider the ways in which gothic fiction itself helped to shape thinking about sexual matters, create the darker shadows of the dominant fiction, and jump-start the age of sexology. Haggerty examines a variety of issues, including the ways in which gothic fiction centers on loss as the foreclosure of homoerotic possibility, the uses to which same-sex desire can be put in a patriarchal culture, and the relationship between transgressive sexual behaviors and a range of religious behaviors understood as "Catholic." Other chapters consider the erotic implications of gothic millenialism and move beyond the eighteenth century to discuss gothic fiction in the 1890s and 1990s, including Henry James's "The Ambassadors", Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles", and Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252073533
• ISBN 13: 9780252073533
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231