A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition
by Gregory Woods
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Description
While many books have been written about gay writing, this is the first full-scale account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present. Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, it includes chapters on the significant periods of cultural history (the Greek and Roman civilisations, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, the American major writers (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Proust) and on common themes (boyhood, show more mourning, masturbation). A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it covers a definitive history of a tradition, it covers a massive field in terms of time (from Homer to Edmund White), literary status (from cultural icons like Virgil and Dante to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett), and location (from Mishima's Tokyo and Abu Nuwas' Baghdad to David Leavitt's New York). Taking a deliberately controversial view, A History of Gay Literature also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men. It addresses conspicuous gaps, such as the lack of a substantial literature of the gay holocaust and the dearth of gay writing in postcolonial African poetry. In the sheer breadth of its scope, the book confronts recent trends in Anglo-American gay studies, both by insisting on the internationalism of homosexual culture and by reasserting a continuity of homo-erotic traditions between the ancient world and the present. Furthermore, by declining to focus only on the most obvious authors and texts, Woods succeeds in both widening the gay canon and reminding us of the large variety of gay works within the mainstream. What emerges is a gay male literature that is far from peripheral to the world's major cultural traditions. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Comprehensive but muddled and his sweep too wide in some places. Good for peering into some abandoned closets in the male homosexual past, but surprisingly weak in its presentation and arguments.
The first full-scale account of gay male literature. Impressive in that it covers everything from the end of the twentieth century to the classics of ancient Greece. Since modernism and post-modernism have emerged, it is helpful to take a retrospective look at the body of work written by and about gay men.
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Author Information
13+ Works 391 Members
Common Knowledge
- Dedication
- In 1951 the Fleet Street editor Leonard Crocombe dedicated his book Slow Ship to Hong Kong to his elder daughter. A History of Gay Literature is dedicated to the same unique individual: my mother, Charmion Woods.
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, LGBTQ+, Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 809.89206642 — Literature & rhetoric Literature, rhetoric & criticism History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures By or for groups of persons Cultural theory of the literature of social groups Sexual minorities
- LCC
- PN56 .H57 .W66 — Language and Literature Literature (General) Literature (General) Theory. Philosophy. Esthetics
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 149
- Popularity
- 219,067
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.29)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
