From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

Nicholas F. Radel's Understanding Edmund White, the first book-length critical study of White's work, examines America's best-known gay novelist within the changing social contexts of the past half-century, when gay and lesbian people moved from being seen as psychologically deviant to being increasingly accepted as productive members of society. Radel explores the ways White documents this cultural transition, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, and contributes to it by making gay writing a source for new knowledge of sexuality.Taking into account recent scholarship on White, Radel...