Peta Mayer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620597
- eISBN:
- 9781789629927
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620597.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. ...
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Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.Less
Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.
Adrian May
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786940438
- eISBN:
- 9781789629118
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786940438.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies ...
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This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, are shown to harbour a sense of artistic exceptionalism which often precludes representations of the everyday, and therefore also limits political solidarity with those usually defended by Lignes. Despite the racial or gendered exclusions it can produce, literary elitism or conservatism is in itself not necessarily criticised, but the hostility to mass culture inculcated by some aesthetic Marxist approaches is seen to be politically unhelpful in the present moment and other approaches to cultural politics in Lignes are sought. After Alain Badiou’s Circonstances 3 caused a row over anti-Semitism and the critique of Israel, it is suggested that the strategic essentialism of Judith Butler provides a more appropriate stance compared to Badiou’s strategic universalism. Lastly, Lignes’ virtual silence on gender and sexuality issues (a stance softening in recent issues) is contrasted to the Parti Socialiste’s progressive measures on parity, PACs and gay marriage.Less
This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, are shown to harbour a sense of artistic exceptionalism which often precludes representations of the everyday, and therefore also limits political solidarity with those usually defended by Lignes. Despite the racial or gendered exclusions it can produce, literary elitism or conservatism is in itself not necessarily criticised, but the hostility to mass culture inculcated by some aesthetic Marxist approaches is seen to be politically unhelpful in the present moment and other approaches to cultural politics in Lignes are sought. After Alain Badiou’s Circonstances 3 caused a row over anti-Semitism and the critique of Israel, it is suggested that the strategic essentialism of Judith Butler provides a more appropriate stance compared to Badiou’s strategic universalism. Lastly, Lignes’ virtual silence on gender and sexuality issues (a stance softening in recent issues) is contrasted to the Parti Socialiste’s progressive measures on parity, PACs and gay marriage.
Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311352
- eISBN:
- 9781846313882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313882.003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The chapter illustrates the personal accounts and recollections of Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge and their path for the discovery of queer identities and their search for lesbian science ...
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The chapter illustrates the personal accounts and recollections of Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge and their path for the discovery of queer identities and their search for lesbian science fiction. The chapter also discusses Griffith and Pearson's views and experiences as writers of queer science fiction.Less
The chapter illustrates the personal accounts and recollections of Nicola Griffith and Kelly Eskridge and their path for the discovery of queer identities and their search for lesbian science fiction. The chapter also discusses Griffith and Pearson's views and experiences as writers of queer science fiction.
Renate Günther
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853235460
- eISBN:
- 9781846313943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853235460.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a ...
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Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.Less
Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.
Paulina Pająk
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781942954569
- eISBN:
- 9781789629392
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781942954569.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter compares the reception of Hall's novel in Britain and Poland and its important legacy to the LGBTQ community. Pajak states that the novel survived because of the intellectual modernist ...
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This chapter compares the reception of Hall's novel in Britain and Poland and its important legacy to the LGBTQ community. Pajak states that the novel survived because of the intellectual modernist network, which acted as custodians of literary culture.Less
This chapter compares the reception of Hall's novel in Britain and Poland and its important legacy to the LGBTQ community. Pajak states that the novel survived because of the intellectual modernist network, which acted as custodians of literary culture.
Jeanne Cortiel
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780853236146
- eISBN:
- 9781781380512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853236146.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, Adrienne Rich talks about the ‘lesbian continuum’, a community of women that incorporates multiple forms of woman-woman relationships. The lesbian continuum reveals ...
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In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, Adrienne Rich talks about the ‘lesbian continuum’, a community of women that incorporates multiple forms of woman-woman relationships. The lesbian continuum reveals how women's role in reproduction is intimately linked to compulsory heterosexuality. This continuum is evident in Joanna Russ's texts, in which she explores the liberatory potential of consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others. In her 1981 essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’, Russ identifies a theme which she calls ‘the rescue of the female child’, whereby an older woman rescues a younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life entirely determined by patriarchy. This rescue pattern is pervasive in Russ's work, from ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) to ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982) and ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982). Russ's critique of patriarchy strongly intersects with psychoanalysis, with the recurrent rescue story upturning the relationship between mother and daughter in the patriarchal context.Less
In ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’, Adrienne Rich talks about the ‘lesbian continuum’, a community of women that incorporates multiple forms of woman-woman relationships. The lesbian continuum reveals how women's role in reproduction is intimately linked to compulsory heterosexuality. This continuum is evident in Joanna Russ's texts, in which she explores the liberatory potential of consciously inhabiting the female body and connecting to others. In her 1981 essay ‘Recent Feminist Utopias’, Russ identifies a theme which she calls ‘the rescue of the female child’, whereby an older woman rescues a younger woman or girl from her initiation into a mature life entirely determined by patriarchy. This rescue pattern is pervasive in Russ's work, from ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) to ‘The Little Dirty Girl’ (1982) and ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982). Russ's critique of patriarchy strongly intersects with psychoanalysis, with the recurrent rescue story upturning the relationship between mother and daughter in the patriarchal context.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311826
- eISBN:
- 9781846315268
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846311826.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Lesbian Body was written by Monique Wittig. Within the text, lists of anatomical names for parts of the lesbian body interweaved with the narratives that discuss the mutual dismembering and ...
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The Lesbian Body was written by Monique Wittig. Within the text, lists of anatomical names for parts of the lesbian body interweaved with the narratives that discuss the mutual dismembering and remembering of the lovers J/e and tu. The text unable to write hymen without undermining its project as a ‘text written by women exclusively for women, careless of male approval’, for ‘Women who live among themselves and for themselves at all the generally accepted levels: fictional, symbolic, actual’. The Lesbian Body was a prequel to the Celestina. In terms of the fractal, The Lesbian Body was a hymen, and Celestina took up where Wittig leaves off, making and unmaking in a context that takes both narrative and social consequences into account.Less
The Lesbian Body was written by Monique Wittig. Within the text, lists of anatomical names for parts of the lesbian body interweaved with the narratives that discuss the mutual dismembering and remembering of the lovers J/e and tu. The text unable to write hymen without undermining its project as a ‘text written by women exclusively for women, careless of male approval’, for ‘Women who live among themselves and for themselves at all the generally accepted levels: fictional, symbolic, actual’. The Lesbian Body was a prequel to the Celestina. In terms of the fractal, The Lesbian Body was a hymen, and Celestina took up where Wittig leaves off, making and unmaking in a context that takes both narrative and social consequences into account.
