WOLFSKINS AND TOGAS: LESBIAN AND GAY HISTORICAL FICTIONS, 1870 TO THE PRESENT
Abstract
This thesis examines the role of historical reference in the representation of homosexuality
in British literature since the late nineteenth century. The texts it examines are both literal
fictions - novels, short stories and poems - and less 'imaginative' forms, such as
biography, historiography and sexology: its main project is to disentangle the network of
discourses facilitating and restricting representation of the homosexual past. It identifies
the history of this representation as a series of moments - the turn of the century, the
1930s, the 1950s, for example - when homosexuality was redefined, and lesbian and gay
traditions correspondingly reinvented. This continual reinvention was often the work of
homosexuals themselves:the thesis demonstrates how historical representation has allowed
lesbians and gay men to intervene in sexual debate when more obviously 'contemporary'
dissident voices were being publicly silenced. Chapters I and 2 examine the invocation
of historical example within the late Victorian homophile subculture, and argue that the
ancient Greek practice of paiderastia provided tum-of-the-century homosexuals with an
affirmative model with which to counter juridical and sexological prescription. Chapters
3 and 4 consider the extent to which Antinous and Sappho became established in the same
period as homosexual icons, but were subtly reconstructed by different, sometimes
competing, sexual discourses.Subsequent chapters explore the influence of literary models
such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well ofLoneliness (1928) upon lesbian historical fiction and
biography of the 1930s, and uncover some hitherto forgotten lesbian texts; examine the
role of male homosexuality in the women's historical romance of the 1950s; and discuss
the homoerotic historical fiction of lesbian authors Mary Renault and Bryher. The final
chapter considers recent lesbian and gay historical fiction, and finds reflected in the genre
the modem homosexual self-image with all its gender and racial tensions.
Authors
Waters, Sarah AnnCollections
- Theses [4116]