The Literature of Lesbianism

The Literature of Lesbianism PDF Author: Terry Castle
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125109
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1150

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Book Description
Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. This anthology registers that fact in as encompassing and enlightening a way as possible. Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism."

The Literature of Lesbianism

The Literature of Lesbianism PDF Author: Terry Castle
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125109
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1150

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. This anthology registers that fact in as encompassing and enlightening a way as possible. Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism."

Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature

Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature PDF Author: Meredith Miller
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810849419
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
"This Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature serves two primary functions: to provide further information to those already familiar with the field and to explain it to those discovering it for the first time. A chronology provides a historical perspective, an introduction gives a general yet detailed overview, and the dictionary contains several hundred cross-referenced entries on important writers such as Sappho, Colette, and Mary Wollstonecraft, styles, themes, literary movement, publishers, and outstanding works of the genre. Completed by an extensive bibliography, this book examines the factors influencing the development of the lesbian identity as an interaction between readers and writers of all kinds of literature."--BOOK JACKET.

The Lesbian in Literature

The Lesbian in Literature PDF Author: Barbara Grier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Proust's Lesbianism

Proust's Lesbianism PDF Author: Elisabeth Ladenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801435959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
For decades, Elisabeth Ladenson says, critics have misread or ignored a crucial element in Marcel Proust's fiction--his representation of lesbians. Her challenging new book definitively establishes the centrality of lesbianism as sexual obsession and aesthetic model in Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu. Traditional readings of the Recherche have dismissed Proust's "Gomorrah"--his term for women who love other women--as a veiled portrayal of the novelist's own homosexuality. More recently, "queer-positive" rereadings have viewed the novel's treatment of female sexuality as ancillary to its accounts of Sodom and its meditations on time and memory. Ladenson instead demonstrates the primacy of lesbianism to the novel, showing that Proust's lesbians are the only characters to achieve a plenitude of reciprocated desire. The example of Sodom, by contrast, is characterized by frustrated longing and self-loathing. She locates the work's paradigm of hermetic relations between women in the self-sufficient bond between the narrator's mother and grandmother. Ladenson traces Proust's depictions of male and female homosexuality from his early work onward, and contextualizes his account of lesbianism in late-nineteenth-century sexology and early twentieth-century thought. A vital contribution to the fields of queer theory and of French literature and culture, Ladenson's book marks a new stage in Proust studies and provides a fascinating chapter in the history of a literary masterpiece's reception.

Insane Passions

Insane Passions PDF Author: Christine Coffman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819568199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.

The Apparitional Lesbian

The Apparitional Lesbian PDF Author: Terry Castle
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231076531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries

Lesbian Decadence

Lesbian Decadence PDF Author: Nicole G. Albert
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 1939594219
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnées," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the Belle Époque. Lesbian Decadence, now available in English for the first time, provides a new analysis and synthesis of the depiction of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and a symptom of social malaise as well as a fantasy in that most vibrant place and period in history. In this newly translated work, praised by leading critics as "authoritative," "stunning," and "a marvel of elegance and erudition," Nicole G. Albert analyzes and synthesizes an engagingly rich sweep of historical representations of the lesbian mystique in art and literature. Albert contrasts these visions to moralists' abrupt condemnations of "the lesbian vice," as well as the newly emerging psychiatric establishment's medical fury and their obsession on cataloging and classifying symptoms of "inversion" or "perversion" in order to cure these "unbalanced creatures of love." Lesbian Decadence combines literary, artistic, and historical analysis of sources from the mainstream to the rare, from scholarly studies to popular culture. The English translation provides a core reference/text for those interested in the Decadent movement, in literary history, in French history and social history. It is well suited for courses in gender studies, women's studies, LGBT history, and lesbianism in literature, history, and art.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature PDF Author: Jodie Medd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316453561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature PDF Author: E. L. McCallum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316194566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1203

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness PDF Author: Radclyffe Hall
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473374081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.