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Beginning with Somerset Maugham's innovative, sexually dissident South Seas novel and tales and Alfred Hitchcock's gay-inflected revisiting of the Jack the Ripper sensation in silent film, this book considers the continuing presence of the past in future-oriented work of the 1930s and the Second World War by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and the playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton. The final three chapters carry the discussion to the present in analyses of works by lesbian, postcolonial, and gay authors such as Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, and Alan Hollinghurst. Focusing on questions about temporality and changes in gender and sexuality, especially gay and lesbian, straight and queer, following the rejection of the Victorian patriarchal marriage model, this study examines the continuing influence of late Victorian Aestheticist and Decadent culture in Modernist writing and its permutations in England.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Modernity and Degeneration in Somerset Maugham and Paul Gauguin:
The Moon and Sixpence and the South Sea Tales
Chapter Two
Haunting the West End: Oscar Wilde and Silent Hitchcock
Chapter Three
History and Revolution in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show
Chapter Four
Pathological Legacies:
Patriarchy in Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes
Chapter Five
"A New Space of Time": Determining the Future in The Years
Chapter Six
Black-out: Anti-Fascism in Patrick Hamilton's Rope, Gaslight, and Hangover Square
Chapter Seven
George Orwell, Futurity, and Male Homosexual Panic
Chapter Eight
Queering Past--and Future--in Sarah Waters' Affinity
Chapter Nine
Ecological Time and Social Desire in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
Chapter Ten
Male Homoerotics
in the Metamodernist Fictions of Alan Hollinghurst
About the author
Richard Dellamora is a widely published author on dissident male and female sexuality in Victorian and twentieth-century literature, including Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Radclyffe Hall, A Life in the Writing (2011), among other works and edited collections. Dellamora is Professor Emeritus in the departments of English and Cultural Studies and Fellow of the Centre for Theory, Politics, and Culture at Trent University (Canada). He currently lives and continues to write in Santa Monica, California. Dellamora completed an A. B. at Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.); a B. A.at Queens’ College, Cambridge University; and a Ph.D. in English at Yale University. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.
Summary
Beginning with Somerset Maugham’s innovative South Seas novel and tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s gay-inflected revisiting of the Jack the Ripper sensation in silent film, this book considers the continuing presence of the past in future-oriented work of the 1930s and the Second World War.
