Title search results
Showing 1 - 6 of 6 items
"Hello," I Lied
By M. E. Kerr. 1997
Summering in the Hamptons on the estate of a famous rock star, seventeen-year-old Lang tries to decide how to tell…
his longtime friends that he is gay, while struggling with an unexpected infatuation with a girl from France.Imaginative Resistance, Queer Fiction and the Law: Same-Sex Desire and the Good Life in Heteronormative Orders
By Aleardo Zanghellini. 2022
Imaginative Resistance, Queer Fiction and the Law develops a novel account of how heteronormative sociolegal orders undermine the well-being of…
same-sex attracted people, even when these normative orders may fall short of coercively interfering with their choices. Queer well-being is generally studied from psychological perspectives, through the concept of ‘minority stress.’ Taking four texts of mid-century Anglo-American queer fiction as illustrative case studies, this book argues – in a philosophical rather than a psychological register – that heteronormativity also affects queer well-being in more intangible ways. The central claim is that heteronormativity shackles the imagination: it curtails no less the imaginative reach of authors of queer fiction, than our ability – engaged as we are in projects of self-authorship – to make-believe personal futures in which same-sex intimacy is brought to bear on our well-being. The book’s central claim re-works a concept central to the philosophy of fiction – ‘imaginative resistance’ – and puts it into service of questions raised in moral philosophy. Apart from its political and normative implications – strengthening the case for at least some global gay rights – and from challenging some of queer theory’s orthodoxies, the book also makes contributions to queer literary history, criticism and biography. Drawing on archival material and personal interviews, fresh readings are offered of Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gillian Freeman’s The Leather Boys (1961), and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952) and The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), making a case for their inclusion in the queer literary canon. Imaginative Resistance, Queer Fiction and the Law will appeal to students of literary criticism, queer sociolegal history, law & literature, the philosophy of fiction, and queer theory, politics and ethics.For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century)
By Charles Warren Stoddard. 2023
Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) was, during his life, an acclaimed and prolific writer in multiple genres: poetry, travel sketches, personal…
memoir, and conversion narrative. His most popular works were dispatches primarily from the South Sea Islands but also extended into Palestine, Egypt, and what would become known as Hawai‘i, most of which were published in the San Francisco Chronicle and then collected into books.For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (1903) is Stoddard’s only novel. This new edition, as with other works in Penn Press’s series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century, returns and reframes an important queer literary text to print. Set mostly in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the novel features a protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of that place and time—the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. The novel is both formally experimental and largely autobiographical. Thus Paul comes into contact, as Stoddard did, with writers, artists, actors, directors, priests, adventurers, and many others as he attempts to begin his career. Bohemian artistic life and erotic experimentation go hand in hand here: Paul has multiple relationships with other men even as he writes a novel that features similar liaisons. At the very end of the story, while on a cruise in the Pacific, Paul impulsively leaves his ship and disappears in a canoe with some young Hawaiian men. This parallels Stoddard’s life too: he spent many long periods of his life in Hawai‘i, where he found the local homoerotic customs to his liking.This Q19 volume also includes three of Stoddard’s Hawaiian travel sketches, which chronicle his intimate personal relationship with a Hawaiian youth he calls Kána-Aná. The volume contains a full critical introduction as well as extensive annotations explaining textual references of various kinds and identifying parallels with Stoddard’s own life.A Marsh Island (Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century)
By Sarah Orne Jewett. 2023
Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The…
Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel’s themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett’s decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett’s determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields’s place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region’s saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.Jewett’s works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and have garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett’s work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of “companionship” itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together: A Memoir
By Maurice Vellekoop. 2024
&“Maurice Vellekoop's beautiful graphic memoir feels painfully honest. It's about art and life and families and belief, about who we…
are and what forms us, the magic and the hurt, and it evokes times that are well-lost while reminding us of the battles still being fought every day. Most of all, I think, it's about love.&” —Neil GaimanFor fans of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, I&’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is an epic graphic memoir about a queer illustrator surviving his intensely Christian childhood in 1970s Toronto.Meet little Maurice Vellekoop, the youngest of four children raised by Dutch immigrants in the 1970s in a blue-collar suburb of Toronto. Despite their working-class milieu, the Vellekoops are devoted to art, music, and film, and they instill a deep reverence for the arts in young Maurice—except for literature. He&’d much rather watch Cher and Carol Burnett on TV than read a book. He also loves playing with his girlfriends&’ Barbie dolls and helping his Mum in her hair salon, which she runs out of the basement of their house. In short, he is really, really gay. Which is a huge problem, because the family is part of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist sect. They go to church twice on Sunday, and they send their kids to a private Christian school, catechism classes, and the Calvinist Cadet Corps. Needless to say, the church is intolerant of homosexuality. Though she loves her son deeply, Maurice&’s mother, Ann, cannot accept him, setting the course for a long estrangement. Vellekoop struggles through all of this until he graduates from high school and is accepted into the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s. Here he finds a welcoming community of bohemians, including a brilliant, flamboyantly gay professor who encourages him to come out. But just as he&’s dipping his toes into the waters of gay sex and love, a series of romantic disasters, followed by a violent attack, sets him back severely. And then the shadow of the AIDS era descends. Maurice reacts by retreating to the safety of childhood obsessions, and seeks to satisfy his emotional needs with film- and theatre-going, music, boozy self-medication, and prolific art-making. When these tactics inevitably fail, Vellekoop at last embarks on a journey towards his heart&’s true desire. In psychotherapy, the spiderweb of family, faith, guilt, sexuality, mental health, the intergenerational fallout of World War II, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, French Formula Hairspray, and much more at last begins to untangle. But it&’s going to be a long, messy, and occasionally hilarious process. I&’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is an enthralling portrait of what it means to be true to yourself, to learn to forgive, and to be an artist.The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (Routledge Literature Handbooks)
By Douglas A. Vakoch, Sabine Sharp. 2024
The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global…
experts in the field. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of trans literature, highlighting the core topics, genres, and periods important for scholarship now and in the future.Covering the main approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of the core topics guiding contemporary trans literary theory and criticism, including the Anthropocene, archival speculation, activism, BDSM, Black studies, critical plant studies, culture, diaspora, disability, ethnocentrism, home, inclusion, monstrosity, nondualist philosophies, nonlinearity, paradox, pedagogy, performativity, poetics, religion, suspense, temporality, visibility, and water. Exploration of diverse literary genres, forms, and periods through a trans lens, such as archival fiction, artificial intelligence narratives, autobiography, climate fiction, comics, creative writing, diaspora fiction, drama, fan fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, manga, medieval literature, minor literature, modernist literature, mystery and detective fiction, nature writing, poetry, postcolonial literature, radical literature, realist fiction, Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, science fiction, travel writing, utopian literature, Victorian literature, and young adult literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, gender studies, trans studies, literary theory, and literary criticism.