Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World - Softcover

Edsall, Nicholas C

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813925436 ISBN 13: 9780813925431

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2006

Synopsis

As recently as the 1970s, gay and lesbian history was a relatively unexplored field for serious scholars. The past quarter century, however, has seen enormous growth in gay and lesbian studies. The literature is now voluminous; it is also widely scattered and not always easily accessible. In Toward Stonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon both scholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures in the modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society.

Edsall's survey begins three hundred years ago in northwestern Europe, when homosexual subcultures recognizably similar to those of our own era began to emerge, and it follows their surprisingly diverse paths through the Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. The book then turns to the Victorian era, tracing the development of articulate and self-aware homosexual subcultures. With a greater sense of identity and organization came new forms of resistance: this was the age that saw the persecution of Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as the medical establishment's labeling of homosexuality as a sign of degeneracy.

The book's final section locates the foundations of present-day gay sub-cultures in a succession of twentieth-century scenes and events--in pre-Nazi Germany, in the lesbian world of interwar Paris, in the law reforms of 1960s England--culminating in the emergence of popular movements in the postwar United States.

Rather than examining these groups in isolation, the book considers them in their social contexts and as comparable to other subordinate groups and minority movements. In the process, Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are its primary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.

About this title

Review:

More than thirty years after Stonewall, we have unmanageable numbers of articles and books on different countries and periods, so we are ready for, and indeed have a genuine need for, a synthetic narrative and analysis. No one else has undertaken such a project in a scholarly spirit. Toward Stonewall makes an original and substantial contribution to the field of gay and lesbian studies.

--Jeffrey Merrick, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and coeditor of Homosexuality in French History and Culture

About the Author:

Nicholas C. Edsall is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and the author of Richard Cobden: Independent Radical.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0813925436
• ISBN 13: 9780813925431
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392