This book gathers the most recent scholarship on the historicization of masculinity by the most original and widely respected thinkers in the field. By using the analytical tools of Queer Theory these interdisciplinary scholars have reconfigured the history of sexuality in radically altering how we think about sexuality and how we write history.

George Eliot was passionate about music and her writing is steeped in musical allusion. This book explores musical reference in her work and investigates contexts such as Eliot's friendship with Wagner, the legacy of Romanticism, music's role in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of female musicality. The book establishes how intensely Eliot's musical allusions are informed by her contemporary culture and offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which she took literary realism into previously uncharted regions.