Read more
This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.
List of contents
1. Queer novelties Michael Cobb; 2. Queer theater and performance Sean Metzger; 3. Queer poetry, between 'as is' and 'as if' Eric Keenaghan; 4. Writing queer lives: autobiography and memoir Julie Avril Minich; 5. Queer cinema, queer writing, queer criticism Lucas Hilderbrand; 6. Nineteenth-century queer literature Travis Foster; 7. Literary and sexual experimentalism in the interwar years Daniela Caselli; 8. The Cold War closet Michael P. Bibler; 9. The time of AIDS and the rise of 'post-gay' Guy Davidson; 10. Gender and sexuality L. H. Stallings; 11. Intersections of race, gender, and sexuality: queer of color critique Kyla Wazana Tompkins; 12. Psychoanalytic literary criticism of gay and lesbian American literature Judith Roof; 13. Post-structuralism: originators and heirs Melissa Jane Hardie; 14. Transnational queer imaginaries, intimacies, insurgencies Martin Joseph Ponce.
About the author
Scott Herring is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His previous books include The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, and Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Herring's articles have also appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, GLQ, and PMLA.
Summary
This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It addresses how queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading. In so doing this Companion details the chief genres, historical backgrounds, and interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.
