The Literature Of Lesbianism

Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. This anthology registers that fact in as encompassing and enlightening a way as possible. Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism."

For decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust's fiction--his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Traditional readings of the Recherche have dismissed Proust's "Gomorrah"--his term for women who love other women--as a veiled portrayal of the novelist's own homosexuality. More recently, "queer-positive" rereadings have viewed the novel's treatment of female sexuality as ancillary to its accounts of Sodom and its meditations on time and memory. Ladenson instead demonstrates the primacy of lesbianism to the novel, showing that Proust's lesbians are the only characters to achieve a plenitude of reciprocated desire. The example of Sodom, by contrast, is characterized by frustrated longing and self-loathing. She locates the work's paradigm of hermetic relations between women in the self-sufficient bond between the narrator's mother and grandmother. Ladenson traces Proust's depictions of male and female homosexuality from his early work onward, and contextualizes his account of lesbianism in late-nineteenth-century sexology and early twentieth-century thought. A vital contribution to the fields of queer theory and of French literature and culture, Ladenson's book marks a new stage in Proust studies and provides a fascinating chapter in the history of a literary masterpiece's reception.

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries

This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

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.

Damned Women charts the previously unexplored literary territory of the place of lesbians in the French novel. Beginning with the early depictions of lesbians as "decadent monsters" by nineteenth-century male authors such as Diderot, Balzac, and Gautier, Jennifer Waelti-Walters shows how later, little-known female writers struggled to free lesbian characters from imposed stereotypes.

"This Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature serves two primary functions: to provide further information to those already familiar with the field and to explain it to those discovering it for the first time. A chronology provides a historical perspective, an introduction gives a general yet detailed overview, and the dictionary contains several hundred cross-referenced entries on important writers such as Sappho, Colette, and Mary Wollstonecraft, styles, themes, literary movement, publishers, and outstanding works of the genre. Completed by an extensive bibliography, this book examines the factors influencing the development of the lesbian identity as an interaction between readers and writers of all kinds of literature."--BOOK JACKET.