Note: LGBT+ is used throughout this blog post in keeping with terminology adopted by the University of Oxford’s Equality and Diversity Unit: https://edu.admin.ox.ac.uk/networks.
Introduction
This month is LGBT+ History Month, a period of advocacy and awareness-raising intended to promote equality and diversity. To celebrate this campaign, this post aims to highlight LGBT+ influences on and within literature. It begins by showcasing some topical overviews, available to University members online, and includes a list of English Faculty Library staff’s favourite titles written by LGBT+ authors.
In line with the aims of LGBT+ History Month, work is ongoing across the Bodleian Libraries to diversify collections in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A great place to find out more about this is the Changing the Narrative LibGuide, introduced in 2020 as part of a project to enhance the visibility and coverage of collections concerning LGBT+ Studies, Women’s Studies, Disability Studies, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Studies and their intersections. A success of the project has been the recent acquisition of the LGBT Magazine Archive, which includes some of the longest-running, most influential publications of this type. Targeted purchasing is an important aspect of the Libraries’ drive to rebalance its provision and recommendations for resources are welcome.
LGBT+ Influence in Literature
It is impossible to capture comprehensively the enduring effects LGBT+ people have had on literature; as Hannah Gabrielle of the British Library notes, “LGBTQ perspectives, themes, influences and contributions cut through all sections of the literary canon.”
The texts listed below are therefore intended only to provide an indication of some of the different ways linkages between LGBT+ experiences and literary mediums can be conceptualised and explored. At the time of writing, each title is accessible to University members online via Single Sign-On.
1
Meem, Deborah T., and Michelle Gibson, Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies (London: SAGE, 2010)
About the Book:
By combining accessible introductory and explanatory material with primary texts and artifacts, this text/reader explores the development and growth of LGBT identities and the interdisciplinary nature of sexuality studies.
Section III provides a concise summary on LGBT+ literary and artistic contributions and the impact of these works in shaping distinctive cultural identities.
2
Rivkin, Julie, Literary theory: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, 2017)
About the book:
The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant. Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms.
3
Stevens, Hugh, The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
About the book:
This Companion introduces readers to the range of debates that inform studies of works by lesbian and gay writers and of literary representations of same-sex desire and queer identities. Each chapter introduces key concepts in the field in an accessible way and uses several important literary texts to illustrate how these concepts can illuminate our readings of them. Authors discussed range from Henry James, E. M. Forster and Gertrude Stein to Sarah Waters and Carol Ann Duffy. The contributors showcase the wide variety of approaches and theoretical frameworks that characterise this field, drawing on related themes of gender and sexuality. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this volume offers a stimulating introduction to the diversity of approaches to lesbian and gay literature.
4
McCallum, E. L., The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
About the book:
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.
5
Sanchez, Melissa E., Shakespeare and Queer Theory (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019)
About the book:
Shakespeare and Queer Theory is an indispensable guide on the ongoing critical debates about queer method both within and beyond Shakespeare and early modern studies.
Clearly elucidating the central ideas of the theory, the field’s historical emergence from feminist and gay and lesbian studies within the academy, and political activism related to the AIDS crisis beyond it, it also illuminates current debates about historicism and embodiment.
Through a series of original readings of texts including Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Venus and Adonis, as well as film adaptations of early modern drama including Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and Edward II, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and Julie Taymor’s Titus, it illustrates the value of queer theory to Shakespeare scholarship, and the value of Shakespearean texts to queer theory.
6
Friedman, Dustin, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2019)
About the book:
Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork’s value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its “art for art’s sake” rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being queer can be an advantage not in spite but because of social hostility toward nonnormative desires.
Showing how aesthetes—among them Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field—harnessed the force that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called “the negative,” Friedman reveals how becoming self-aware of one’s sexuality through art can be both liberating and affirming of humanity’s capacity for subjective autonomy. Challenging one of the central precepts of modern queer theory—the notion that the heroic subject of Enlightenment thought is merely an effect of discourse and power—Friedman develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between desire and self-determination. He also articulates an innovative, queer notion of subjective autonomy that encourages reflecting critically on one’s historical moment and envisioning new modes of seeing, thinking, and living that expand the boundaries of social and intellectual structures.
Before Queer Theory is an audacious reimagining that will appeal to scholars with interests in Victorian studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and art history.
7
Sinfield, Alan, Cultural politics — Queer Reading (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
About the book:
Was Shakespeare gay? Is The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic? How does mainstream reading differ from that of subcultural groups? In this lively and readable book, Alan Sinfield challenges the assumptions of English literature and investigates the principles and practices that may inform lesbian and gay reading.
8
Herring, Scott, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
About the book:
At the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it. This book, a major rethinking of American literature and culture, explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. It examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control. The book is polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics.
9
Carroll, Rachel, Transgender and The Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020)
About the book:
Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000), a rewriting of the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment.
A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fictional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities and histories. By revisiting twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives, including stage and film adaptations, this book aims to examine the legacies of this representational history, exploring the extent to which transgender potential can be recovered and realised.
Staff Picks
Some of our favourite books, poems and films by LGBT+ authors.
- Baldwin, James, Giovanni’s Room (London: Penguin, 2007)
- Bishop, Elizabeth, Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956)
- Bishop, Elizabeth, “One Art“, The Iowa Review, 10 (1979), 76
- Caravaggio, dir. Derek Jarman (British Film Institute, 2005)
- Choi, Franny, “Weight“, Indiana Review, 38 (2016), 148
- Choi, Franny, “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On“, Poetry, 215 (2019), 286
- Fry, Stephen, Hereos (London: Penguin Books, 2019)
- Isherson, Christopher, A Single Man (London: Methuen, 1964; repr. 1978)
- Sackville-West, V., and Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. by Louise A. DeSalvo and Alexandra Leaska (London: Hutchinson, 1984)
- Smith, Danez, “I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense“, Michigan Quarterly Review, 54 (2015) 407
- Vuong, Ocean, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019)
- Woolf, Virginia, Orlando (London: William Collins, 2014)
Find Out More
LGBT+ advocacy manifests in a variety of activities across the university, from open lecture series to society events. Readers of this post may find the following links of interest:
- Announcement of the Michael Dillon Lecture Series – https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/st-annes-announces-launch-of-michael-dillon-lgbt-lecture-series-in-collaboration-with-frontline-aids/
- OULGBTQ+ Society – http://www.oulgbtq.org/
- Oxford LGBT+ History Month Lectures – https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/oxford-lgbt-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-history-month-lectures
- Queer Studies Network – https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/queer-studies-network
- University of Oxford English Faculty LGBT+ History Month – https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/article/lgbt-history-month-0
- University of Oxford Equality and Diversity Unit: Networks LGBT+ Allies – https://edu.admin.ox.ac.uk/lgbt-allies
- University of Oxford Equality and Diversity Unit: Networks LGBT+ Staff Network – https://edu.admin.ox.ac.uk/lgbt-staff-network