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17254 results in Cambridge Histories

Page 303 of 863

  • 10 - How to Spot a Lesbian in the Early Modern Spanish World

  • from Part II - Renaissance and Early Modern
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 179-196

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the early history of male-male love poetry in Arabic, followed by a section on the social norms underpinning it. It describes the stunning career of erotic epigrams from the Ayyubid period onward. After a "mystical intermezzo", the chapter questions why 'Abdallat-if's epigram was one of the last of its kind. The poet who enabled the breakthrough of homoerotic love poetry was Abu Nuwas. Abu Nuwas soon became one of the most famous Arabic poets of all time. Arabic poetry began as a purely profane literature in pre-Islamic times and remained one of the most important secular discourses in the Islamic era until the present day. Contemporary Western experience shows that despite public campaigns and tremendous progress in gay rights, homophobia is by no means about to vanish. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, homoerotic poetry vanished almost completely and people started to look at their own literary heritage with mixed feelings.

  • 32 - Queer Poetry in the Long Twentieth Century

  • from Part VI - Genres of the Present
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 589-606

  • Summary

    This chapter examines five contexts together with their associated gender terminologies, in order to pursue how same-sex-desiring subjects forge themselves in the crucible of words, space, and time in Chinese-speaking contexts. The five contexts, namely, the theatre, the bar, the school, the movement, and the family. In the Chinese literary imagination, the world of banquets, vocal performance, and operatic theatre is most reliably associated with the representation of sexuality. In contemporary Chinese fiction, the school romance continues to be haunted by the relative perfection of the love between the young women and the disappointments of marriage and motherhood. The abolition of the polygynous household and a range of associated social identities constituted a major site for the institution of Chinese modernity throughout the twentieth century. The legitimacy of new state regimes was consolidated under the new protocol of a monogamous heteronormativity.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Mikko Tuhkanen
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014
  • The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.

  • 34 - Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Fiction in English

  • from Part VI - Genres of the Present
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 626-642

  • Summary

    The rise of a recognized body of queer Native American (US) and Aboriginal (Canadian) literatures occurs in the wake of two concurrent political moments rarely spoken of together - the post-Stonewall movement for gay rights and the Red Power era of Native activism. This chapter describes the historical emergence of queer Native literature in the 1970s. Queer Native fiction, like drama and the early women of color anthologies, emerges in the 1980s. Such fiction varies widely in its depiction of Indigenous experiences, ranging from tribal trickster narratives to representations of urban alienation. The first Native novel with a queer Indigenous protagonist is Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Although fiction, especially full-length fiction, garners a lion's share of public attention, poetry functions as the cornerstone of the queer Native literary canon. The connections between and among the queer Native women writers can be seen in the common themes and also, at times, style of their work.

  • 29 - Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics

  • from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 529-547

  • Summary

    Periods of flourishing and repression of lesbian and gay literature in Spain during the long twentieth century are intimately tied to the country's significant political upheavals and severe censorship of all expressions of sexual desire, but particularly of same-sex sexual practices. Important characteristic of Spanish culture to keep in mind is the profound impact that the nation's primary identity as a Catholic country had on it until the early years of the democracy. The period before the Civil War was marked by a flourishing literary culture so remarkable that critics call it La Edad de Plata, echoing the famed early modern literary apogee of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, La Edad de Oro of Cervantes's El Quijote. During the Civil War, on the Republican side, women acquired many rights and engaged in endeavors previously considered masculine, while men fought at the front. Franco's long dictatorship repressed nonnormative sexualities and halted all gender experimentation.

  • 26 - African Literatures

  • from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 477-497

  • Summary

    The secular eighteenth century makes a nation-state, promulgated through literacy and print, a substitute for a shared religious identity. Both separately and combined, queerness and cosmopolitanism combat the assumed naturalness of nation and heterosexuality and expose them as constructs and nonidentities. By virtue of their shared stubbornness, the two concepts pose a challenge to the twin fictions of nationhood and heteronormativity. The shapes that family, desire, and gender take in world diasporas undermine the perceived normalcy of procreative heterosexuality, which, in turn, has served as the foundation and guardian of the nation-state. Like queer cosmopolitanism of years past, queer diaspora studies enters into an adversarial relationship with nationalism and is vocally resistant to imperialism. The theoretical and literary output by the queers of color introduces experiences of world travelers, who, through multiple cultural and political affiliations and complexity of familial affinities, expand cosmopolitanism beyond the "first world".

  • 35 - Autobiography

  • from Part VI - Genres of the Present
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 643-659

  • Summary

    This chapter combines black sexual minorities to the history of African American and African diasporic writing. The longing between men that presumably structures much within modern art and culture is not mediated by a female cipher. Instead, as Huey Newton suggests himself, the extreme pressure that attends African and African American subjectivity tends to obviate the need to deny the key role that the queer subject must necessarily play in the production and reproduction of culture. Following the lead of lesbian writers, black gay men began in the 1980s to produce small literary magazines that provided room for emerging artists to experiment and develop their craft. Most important of all was the anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. This ambitious work had a number of key accomplishments. The anthology helped to articulate a long tradition of black gay writing that extended from the Harlem Renaissance to the tail end of the twentieth century.

  • 19 - Black Socks, Green Threads: On Proust and the Hermeneutics of Inversion

  • from Part IV - Queer Modernisms
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 344-362

  • Summary

    The Gothic novel, at least prior to the Stonewall Resistance Riot of 1969, is profoundly reticent about the spectacle of direct homophobia, as reticent as it is about the spectacle of homosexuality. To approach the dialogue between the structuring principle of homophobia in the early Gothic novel and the novel's remarkable silence on the topic of male-male sexual relations, one must return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's formative work in Between Men. This chapter describes two Gothic narratives from the long nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish tradition: Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk, and Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella "Carmilla". If The Monk offers its readers a series of anachronistically understood metonyms that can be pressed to cohere in the legible figure of "the homosexual" Le Fanu's "Carmilla" offers a narrative of a young woman named Laura, who lives with her father in a remote castle in the Austrian province of Styria.

  • 1 - The Sappho Tradition

  • from Part I - Reading Ancient and Classical Cultures
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 15-33

  • Summary

    For Western culture, and particularly for women, the Greek lyric poet Sappho, has come down as the original poet of female desire as well as the original figure of same-sex female erotics. Sappho was renowned throughout the ancient world for the unique power and expressiveness of her lyricism. The three primary modes of representing Sappho during the early modern period, incorporating the garbled tradition of "the two Sapphos", were repeatedly elaborated and sometimes conflated. Sappho was represented: as the first example of female poetic excellence; as an early exemplar of the "unnatural" or monstrous sexuality of the tribade; and as a mythologized figure who acts the suicidal abandoned woman in the Ovidian tale of Sappho and Phaon. Apart from the appeal of Sappho's poems to classicists and poets challenging themselves via translation and the use of Aeolian meter, Sappho's representation as an originary poetic figure has captured the imagination of many generations.

  • 15 - The Gothic Novel and the Negotiation of Homophobia

  • from Part III - Enlightenment Cultures
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 272-287

  • Summary

    In the thirty years that have passed since the publication of Alan Bray's landmark book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, feminist and queer scholars have asked and answered the question - how queer was the transvestite theatre, in a variety of ways. This chapter describes some salient trends that have shaped critical interpretations of three transvestite comedies: William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, John Lyly's Galatea, and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl. It provides the diverse ways conjunctions of transvestism and homoeroticism obtain both on the early modern stage and in early modern culture. The chapter uses the term "queer" to signify an array of social and sexual practices, arrangements, and peoples that, when put into discourse, confront or undermine the (perceived) dominant culture's views on gender and sexuality. It deployes "queer" to designate those conjunctions of crossdressing and same-sex desire that in the process of challenging dominant beliefs and attitudes, imagine alternative arrangements and practices.

  • 21 - Modernist Poetry

  • from Part IV - Queer Modernisms
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 378-401

  • Summary

    The African presence in the United States and the construction of American black identity has a history of being sexualized. From this perspective, writing about racialization has often meant writing about sexual relations. Increasingly, scholars have drawn attention not simply to the sexualization of the black body, but also to the historical construction of sexual desire in the writings of African Americans. This chapter explores the representation of same-sex desire as well as the emergence of transgressive ideas about sexuality in these writings. It considers African American writing and cultural expression from the antebellum period until 1930. The chapter outlines the significance of representations of nonnormative sexuality in African American expressive culture that become the context for late twentieth-century works by self-identified gay and lesbian artists. Critical treatments have consistently shown that the logic of enslavement was perverse not simply in the abuse and misuses of power but in the sexual dynamics it encouraged and even required.

  • 9 - English Renaissance Literature in the History of Sexuality

  • from Part II - Renaissance and Early Modern
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 164-178

  • Summary

    The discovery of historical genders and sexualities offers the possibility of establishing continuities between the past and present that allow for identification and a more nuanced understanding of contemporary categories. Sexually, femininity was defined by the passive position in heterosexual intercourse, and yet, one of the principal medieval associations with femininity was sexual voracity. The survey of genders and sexualities discussed in this chapter is organized around a few configurations found in medieval literary texts. Beginning in the twelfth century, the literature of romance initiated a new model of heroic masculinity in tandem with the invention of heterosexual courtly love. Same-sex desire in the Middle Ages appears most often in the context of friendship. Virginity provided a kind of gender transitivity for women in a way that it did not for male saints. Finally, the chapter addresses literary representations of gender transgression and sexual acts between members of the same sex.

  • 6 - Male-Male Love in Classical Arabic Poetry

  • from Part I - Reading Ancient and Classical Cultures
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 107-124

  • Summary

    For Western culture, and particularly for women, the Greek lyric poet Sappho, has come down as the original poet of female desire as well as the original figure of same-sex female erotics. Sappho was renowned throughout the ancient world for the unique power and expressiveness of her lyricism. The three primary modes of representing Sappho during the early modern period, incorporating the garbled tradition of "the two Sapphos", were repeatedly elaborated and sometimes conflated. Sappho was represented: as the first example of female poetic excellence; as an early exemplar of the "unnatural" or monstrous sexuality of the tribade; and as a mythologized figure who acts the suicidal abandoned woman in the Ovidian tale of Sappho and Phaon. Apart from the appeal of Sappho's poems to classicists and poets challenging themselves via translation and the use of Aeolian meter, Sappho's representation as an originary poetic figure has captured the imagination of many generations.

  • 8 - From the Pervert, Back to the Beloved: Homosexuality and Ottoman Literary History, 1453–1923

  • from Part II - Renaissance and Early Modern
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 145-163

  • Summary

    The extent of Greek influence on the Roman practice of homosexuality during the period has been a matter of controversy, with some historians asserting its pervasiveness and others emphasizing indigenous Roman traditions. The comedies of T. Maccius Plautus provide earliest literary references to homosexual relations, but none of the plots of his twenty-one extant plays are primarily about erotic relations among men. Modern readers of the varied poetic corpus of G. Valerius Catullus are often struck by the free employment of sexually explicit language pertaining to both homosexual and heterosexual acts. It is in the poetry of the Augustan Golden Age that one come close to the bisexual indifference characteristic of much Greek erotic poetry. Juvenal's satiric world is populated by a similar menagerie of freaks and oddities. The second century CE, the period of the so-called Pax Romana, was a time of relative political stability and the apogee of Roman prosperity and power.

  • 11 - Cross-Dressing, Queerness, and the Early Modern Stage

  • from Part II - Renaissance and Early Modern
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 197-217

  • Summary

    Female-female eroticism had no formal space in the dominant premodern discourse on sex, which posited the phallus as indispensable to a woman's social and sexual fulfillment. For this reason, inevitably this chapter largely focuses on male, rather than female homoeroticism. The chapter provides a review of some of the earliest Chinese sources on male-male relations, especially because they gave rise to a classic lexicon of homosexuality. The expressions "longyang", "shared peach", and "cut sleeve" are the most prominent of such lexicon, and are still used. Some pornographic narratives from the second half of the seventeenth century indeed feature a new type of libertine, who can be sexually penetrated without his masculine credentials being compromised. The homosexual initiation takes the form of a rape, with the husband taking advantage of the libertine young scholar's intoxicated state. A discursive orientation more critical of homoeroticism can certainly be detected in eighteenth-century fiction.

  • 28 - The Crucible of Space, Time, and Words: Female Same-Sex Subjectivities in Contemporary Chinese-Language Contexts

  • from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
  • Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
    Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    17 November 2014, pp 512-528

  • Summary

    The history of gay and lesbian literature in Russia is closely tied to the troubled evolution of Russian erotic culture as a whole. The enormous gap between the literary culture of Russia's educated elite and the oral culture of the folk shaped the evolution of gay literature in fundamental ways. The relationship of homosexuality to Russian cultural citizenship is a theme that runs throughout the history of Russian gay and lesbian literature. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, Russian culture began to turn away from the serious, socially engaged realism of the previous decades. A sophisticated art-for-art's sake aesthetic emerged, presaging the explosion of artistic innovation in the first two decades of the twentieth century, referred to as the Silver Age of Russian literature. Early post-Soviet gay and lesbian fiction reflected an enduring ambivalence on the part of Russian gays and lesbians themselves toward homosexuality as a native phenomenon.

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