Author: Ruth Vanita
Publisher: Pearson Longman
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 289
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8131708330
Description
From Percy Shelley and Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woold, Ruth Vanita uncovers layers of love between women in a sophisticated and provocative rereading of English literature. She demonstrates that love between women has long formed an enriching and enabling component of both male and female writing. Synthesizing centuries of literature, criticism and mythology, Vanita shifts the critical focus from marginalization of women to their empowerment as literary ancestors. She delineates the formation of alternative families in Meredith, Forster and Vikram Seth, refuting conventional theories of the invisibility of the ‘queer’.
Investigating the hidden ‘Protestant bias’ and male bias that have led thinkers such as Freud and Foucalt to disregard Sapphic presence in Western culture from the medieval period onwards, Vanita challenges many theoretical and cultural assumptions regarding gay and lesbian studies. Her historically rooted approach makes this volume a must for any reader interested in the play of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth–and twentieth-century English literature, especially the students and scholars of queer, literary and cultural studies.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Imagined Ancestries
The Marian Model
The Sapphic Sublime and Romantic Lyricism
Ecstasy in Victorian Aestheticism
Anarchist Feminism and the Homoerotic:
Wilde, Carpenter, Shelley
The search for a "Likeness":
Shakespeare to Michael Field
Sapphic Virgins: Mythmaking Around Love
Between Women in Meredith, Forster, Hope Mirrlees
Biography as Homoerotic Fiction:
Freud, Pater, and Woolf
The Wilde-ness of Woolf:
Evading and embracing death in Orlando
and The Waves
Dogs, Phoenixes, and Other Beasts:
Nonhuman Creatures in Homoerotic Texts
Notes
Index