A History of Gay Literature
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The Male Tradition
Gregory Woods
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This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. 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 through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima`s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas`s Baghdad to David Leavitt`s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.
Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, Gregory Woods confronts recent trends in Anglo-American gay studies, both by insisting on the internationalism of homosexual culture and by reasserting a continuity of homoerotic traditions between the ancient world and the present. He also addresses conspicuous absences and silences, such as the lack of a substantial literature of the gay holocaust and the dearth of gay writing in post-colonial African poetry.
What emerges is a gay male literature that is far from peripheral to the world`s major cultural traditions. This substantial, provocative, and highly readable work celebrates the richness and complexity of the literatures that gay men write, read, and offer to the broadest market.
Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, Gregory Woods confronts recent trends in Anglo-American gay studies, both by insisting on the internationalism of homosexual culture and by reasserting a continuity of homoerotic traditions between the ancient world and the present. He also addresses conspicuous absences and silences, such as the lack of a substantial literature of the gay holocaust and the dearth of gay writing in post-colonial African poetry.
What emerges is a gay male literature that is far from peripheral to the world`s major cultural traditions. This substantial, provocative, and highly readable work celebrates the richness and complexity of the literatures that gay men write, read, and offer to the broadest market.
Gregory Woods is reader in lesbian and gay studies at the Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry, published by Yale University Press.
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ISBN: 9780300072013
Publication Date: February 17, 1998
Publication Date: February 17, 1998
464 pages, 6 3/4 x 9 3/4
50 b/w illus.
50 b/w illus.
