Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy traces the representations of outlaw fathers, or queer patriarchs, and their relationships with their queer sons, in a particular literary tradition: mid-to-late-Victorian and twentieth-century British fiction and memoir. Specifically, I look at such representations in Anthony Trollope s Doctor Thorne (1858) and The Prime Minister (1875-76) (while also drawing on An Autobiography (1883) and The Duke s Children (1880)); Samuel Butler s The Way of All Flesh (published in 1901), Henry James s The Lesson of the Master...

Outlaw Fathers provides an innovative reading of fatherhood and father-son relationships in a number of Victorian and modern literary texts. In addition to using a psychoanalytic paradigm for redefining the concept of patriarchy in literary studies and theory, it joins a larger contemporary conversation about changing masculinities and families.