A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition [Anglais] [Broché]

The very idea of a unique tradition of gay-male writing began relatively recently. Early in the 20th century, homosexual writers began to write more honestly. Yet writers, both gay and straight, have written about the experience of homosexuality since ancient times. In his encyclopedic overview, Gregory Woods has knitted together a transhistorical and transcultural history--a tradition--of gay-male writing over the centuries. Using a broad but readily applicable definition of gay literature that includes works by openly gay men, works in which homosexual activity occurs, and works that manifest a gay "sensibility," Woods manages to move us from Homer to David Leavitt, from Arabic poets of the classical age to contemporary South African poetry, from closeted Victorian memoirs to AIDS literature. By its nature, A History of Gay Literature lacks the specificity of critique that illuminates individual work, but this approach is more than compensated for by the book's ability to locate and discuss amazing similarities of experience and expression throughout history and culture. Highly intelligent, jauntily written, and endlessly informative, A History of Gay Literature is an impressive addition to contemporary gay scholarship. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Woods's (Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry) dense but rewarding history has a lofty aim: "queering the canon." Starting with the man-boy love of Greek classics, this academic text focuses on homoeroticism in the literary imagination. But Woods does more. By analyzing attitudes about homosexual men, he looks at the homophobic ideologies that poetry and prose have encouraged throughout history. While there is not enough information on the role of religion in classifying sodomy as sin, Woods demonstrates that as early as the 12th century, hostility against man-to-man love was evident. But despite the linking of homosexual love with shame and repentance, it formed a culture?described by writers as diverse as Aristophanes, Rumi, William Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes and Jane Austen?that held on. Woods's commentary about the Nazis and about the popular postwar belief that fascism developed because of Germany's tolerance of "sexual perversion" is eye-opening, as is his deconstruction of 1950s crime fiction, which routinely depicted gay men as deviants. Woods moves his readers into the decades since Stonewall and scrutinizes writing that deals with gay pride as well as AIDS. Throughout, his point that homoerotic traditions are a literary constant is well-taken and persuasively argued. Woods makes inroads in defining queer culture and illuminates the essential role gay men have played in the Western canon.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

These finely honed gay readings of selected Western (and some Eastern) literary texts richly reward the careful attention they demand. Woods (Gay & Lesbian Studies/Nottingham Trent Univ., England) extracts the full interpretive mileage to be had from ideals of ambiguity, paradox, and perspective. This is already evident in the structure of the book, which approaches its subject from diverse angles, both chronological and thematic. Separate chapters address, among other topics, the Greek classics, the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, Proust, the Holocaust, women writers, masturbation, boyhood, and the political left. That such a far-ranging gay-themed book is possible at all owes to an ambiguity in the notion of gay reading: A text's status as gay may depend either on the sexual identity of its author or on its susceptibility to placement in interpretive contexts of homosexual attraction. Thus, while the very idea of a canon of gay writing depends on a tradition of gay authorship, a gay reading of Shakespeare's ``fiendishly ambiguous'' Sonnet 20 stands apart from the (contested) sexual identity of its writer. Woods acknowledges and affirms this tension by publishing his book with a major university press, while implying by his frequent intimate use of the selectively embracing, ``us'' that most, if not all of his readers are surely gay. The final brilliant chapter, ``Poetry and Paradox,'' weds the social subversions of paradox typical of all minority groups (compare, from a Jewish perspective, Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing) to the heights of poetic art. Woods's own artistry is evident throughout this elegant and startling book, especially in the memorable turns of phrase (e.g., in the chapter ``The Family and Its Alternatives'': ``Outlaws and inlaws are simply not compatible''). Though grounded in the particulars of gay male identity, this masterpiece of literary (and social) criticism calls across the divides of sex and sexual orientation. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures, languages, and centuries. A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion.