The Queening Of America

Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, gay culture - its humour, its icons, its desires - has been alive and sometimes even visible in the midst of straight American society. David Van Leer puts forward here a series of readings that aim to identify what he calls the "queening" of America, a process by which "rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral." The Queening of America examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight culture. Van Leer then critiques some current models of making homosexuality visible (the packaging of Joe Orton, the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the rise of gay studies), before concluding more optimistically with the possible alliances between gay culture and other minority discourses.

An enlightening unpacking of Cather's writings, from her controversial love letters of the 1890s--in which "queer" is employed to denote sexual deviance--to her epic novels, short stories, and critical writings.

Hailed in the mid-19th century as the most important American poet of the period, Fitz-Greene Halleck was dubbed the American Byron and had a large general readership despite his work's infusion of homosexual themes. This biography portrays him as a prophet of the literary and sexual revolution.

Designed as a companion to The Columbia Literary History of the United States, this compilation of 31 major essays covers the American novel from the 1700s to the present, although the majority deal with the 20th century. Within each era, themes, genres, and topics such as realism, gender, romance, and technology are discussed in depth, as well as modern Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American fiction. Each essayist selects only the authors who best illustrate the topic, thus subtly skewing the view of the literary scene at that time. The volume also covers women, minorities, popular fiction, and the book marketplace. ISBN 0-231-07360-7: $59.95.

Modern North American Criticism and Theory presents the reader with a comprehensive and critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Focusing on the growth and expansion of critical trends and methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts, the book offers a narrative of change, transformation, and the continuous quest for and affirmation of multiple cultural voices and identities. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of whiteness studies and the cultural study of masculinity, this book provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of questioning, debate, and exploration.

Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments addresses a longstanding question in literary and cultural studies: how can a case be made for the ongoing value of the humanities without an articulation of that field's social effects? In response, this book examines how readers "befriend" works of literature, overtures that are based in a curiosity about the world that help those readers to appreciate the world anew. As an instance of this dynamic, it examines how the contemporary social interest in queerness can be contextualized through encounters with texts produced during an earlier era of queer flux: the U.S. nineteenth century. The book offers first-hand accounts of such meetings, weaving within its analysis reports on readers' engagements with literature and the consequences of those connections. It frames such dynamics as central to a new politics, or to finding a vocabulary for a familiar politics that has not received its due.

"In the first critical study of the sex goddess in film, Jessica Hope Jordan illustrates how Jean Harlow uses her sexualized body to "affect" and seduce viewers away from any primary identification with those characters and their plotlines that are supposed to lead the film, to identifying instead with the kind of sexual empowerment and self-possession her characters consistently display. Linking the idea of sexual empowerment to the filmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality, the book additionally covers previous feminist discussions of Mae West's performances as "feminist camp" to argue that West sought to both celebrate and embody for women viewers what she viewed as cultural ideals of femininity and women's sexuality. With Lana Turner and the "cinematic code," the book considers the many problems inherent in both the filmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality in relation to censorship and considers the effects of the Hays Code on hyper-feminine sexuality as depicted in film noir." "The book also importantly presents the first critical discussion of the actress Jayne Mansfield, suggesting that her 1950s open acceptance, celebration, and public promotion of her feminine sexuality, both onscreen and off, makes her not only a precursor of the more sexually liberated 60s, but also, like the other actresses discussed here, a kind of prescient performance artist, even theorist, of feminine sexuality in particular, and cultural ideas about sexuality more generally. Beyond recouping her image as feminist, the book demonstrates how the kind of desire aroused by the sex goddess, a desire which remains endlessly suspended, works as a supreme example of the aesthetic apparatus of cinema itself." --Book Jacket.

Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American literature have been largely ignored. This reference fills this gap by providing more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries for Latin American authors who have treated gay or lesbian material in their works. Each entry explores the significance of gay and lesbian themes in a particular author's writings and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The figures included have a professed gay identity, or have written on gay or lesbian themes in either a positive or negative way, or have authored works in which a gay sensibility can be identified. The volume pays particular attention to the difficulty of ascribing North American critical perspectives to Latin American authors, and studies these authors within the larger context of Latin American culture. The book includes entries for men and women, and for authors from Latin American countries as well as Latino writers from the United States. The entries are written by roughly 60 expert contributors from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.