The Cambridge Companion To American Gay And Lesbian Literature

"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.""--

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It addresses how queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading. In so doing this Companion details the chief genres, historical backgrounds, and interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

In the last two decades, lesbian and gay studies have transformed literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing introduces readers to important concepts, methods and cultural and historical debates relevant to the study of sexuality and literature.

This Companion provides a guide to queer literary and cultural studies, introducing critical debates in the field and an overview of queer approaches to various genres.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In so doing, it delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

The diverse countries of Latin America have produced a lively and ever evolving tradition of novels, many of which are read in translation all over the world. This Companion offers a broad overview of the novel's history and analyses in depth several representative works by, for example, Gabriel García Márquez, Machado de Assis, Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa. The essays collected here offer several entryways into the understanding and appreciation of the Latin American novel in Spanish-speaking America and Brazil. The volume conveys a real sense of the heterogeneity of Latin American literature, highlighting regions whose cultural and geopolitical particularities are often overlooked. Indispensable to students of Latin American or Hispanic studies and those interested in comparative literature and the development of the novel as genre, the Companion features a comprehensive bibliography and chronology and concludes with an essay about the success of Latin American novels in translation.

In the last two decades, lesbian and gay studies have transformed literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing introduces readers to important concepts, methods and cultural and historical debates relevant to the study of sexuality and literature.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.