| Description |
456 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm |
| Contents |
1. The Making of the Gay Tradition -- 2. The Greek Classics -- 3. The Roman Classics -- 4. The Christian Middle Ages -- 5. The Orient -- 6. The European Renaissance -- 7. Christopher Marlowe -- 8. William Shakespeare -- 9. The Pastoral Elegists -- 10. From Libertinism to the Gothic -- 11. New Bearings in the Novel -- 12. The American Renaissance -- 13. Muscular Aestheticism -- 14. Spirit Versus Physique -- 15. Marcel Proust -- 16. Homosexual Men by Women -- 17. The Harlem Renaissance -- 18. The Tragic Sense of Life -- 19. Fantastic Realism -- 20. Towards the Popular -- 21. The Pink Triangle -- 22. The Post-War Starting-Point -- 23. European Poetry on the Left -- 24. Post-War Tragic Fiction -- 25. The Homosexual in Society -- 26. Black African Poetry -- 27. From Solitary Vice to Circle Jerk -- 28. Boys and Boyhood -- 29. The Age of Antibiotics -- 30. The Family and Its Alternatives -- 31. The AIDS Epidemic -- 32. Poetry and Paradox |
| Summary |
While many books have been written about gay writing, this is the first full-scale account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present. Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, it includes chapters on the significant periods of cultural history (the Greek and Roman civilisations, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, the American major writers (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Proust) and on common themes (boyhood, mourning, masturbation). A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it covers a definitive history of a tradition, it covers a massive field in terms of time (from Homer to Edmund White), literary status (from cultural icons like Virgil and Dante to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett), and location (from Mishima's Tokyo and Abu Nuwas' Baghdad to David Leavitt's New York). Taking a deliberately controversial view, A History of Gay Literature also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men. It addresses conspicuous gaps, such as the lack of a substantial literature of the gay holocaust and the dearth of gay writing in postcolonial African poetry. In the sheer breadth of its scope, the book confronts recent trends in Anglo-American gay studies, both by insisting on the internationalism of homosexual culture and by reasserting a continuity of homo-erotic traditions between the ancient world and the present. Furthermore, by declining to focus only on the most obvious authors and texts, Woods succeeds in both widening the gay canon and reminding us of the large variety of gay works within the mainstream. What emerges is a gay male literature that is far from peripheral to the world's major cultural traditions. This substantial, provocative and highly readable work celebrates the richness and complexity of the literatures that gay men write, read, and offer to the broadest market. -- from dust jacket |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [421]-445) and index |
| Subject |
Gays' writings -- History and criticism.
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Homosexuality and literature.
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Homosexuality in literature.
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Literature -- History and criticism.
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| LC no. |
97028159 |
| ISBN |
0300072015 |
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