Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework while refining and resisting it in places to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies...
Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms i...
From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the sense of apocalypse is very much with us. In Postmodern Apocalypse, Richard Dellamora and his contributors examine apocalypse in works by late twentieth-century writers, filmmakers, and critics.
From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s bests...
What is the connection between citizenship and friendship in Victorian fiction? Why do Victorian writers use the portrayal of relations between mentor and protege as a way of meditating on the possibilities of democratic governance? In Friendship's Bonds, Richard Dellamora revisits the classical and Victorian dream that a just society would be one governed by friends. In the actual struggle over who should or should not be eligible for the rights of citizenship, however, the ideal of fraternity was troubled by anxieties about the commingling of populations and the possible conversion...
What is the connection between citizenship and friendship in Victorian fiction? Why do Victorian writers use the portrayal of relations between mentor...
Beginning with Tennyson's In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Dellamora draws on journals, letters, censored texts, and pornography to examine the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian literature.
Central to the struggle over the meaning of masculine desire was the institutional politics of Oxford University, where Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were principal players. As a young man in the 1860s, Pater, the art historian, essayist, and novelist, theorized...
Beginning with Tennyson's In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Del...
"The Well of Loneliness" is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was forbidden for sale or import into England. Its author, Radclyffe Hall, was already well-known as a writer and West End celebrity, but the fame and notoriety of that one book has all but eclipsed a literary output of some half-dozen other novels and several volumes of poetry.
In "Radclyffe...
"The Well of Loneliness" is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex sc...
