Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German

James P. Wilper

Description

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the late nineteenth century. The third is sexual science (or "sexology"), which offered various medical and psychological explanations for same-sex desire and was employed variously to defend, as well as to attempt to cure, this "perversion." And fourth, in the wake of the scandal caused by his trials and conviction for "gross indecency," Oscar Wilde became associated with a homosexual stereotype based on "unmanly" behavior. Wilper analyzes the four novels—Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, E. M. Forster's Maurice, Edward Prime-Stevenson's Imre: A Memorandum, and John Henry Mackay's The Hustler—in relation to these schools of thought, and focuses on the exchange and cross-cultural influence between linguistic and cultural contexts on the subject of love and desire between men.
Acknowledgments

Note on Translations

Introduction

Part 1: Religion and Law

Chapter 1: Sin and Crime

Part 2: Greek Love

Chapter 2: Transcending Greek Love

Chapter 3: The "Manly love of comrades"

Part 3: Science and Sex

Chapter 4: The Highest Being Drawn Down into Decadence

Chapter 5: Health, Masculinity, and the Third Sex

Part 4: Wild about Oscar Wilde?

Chapter 6: A Tough Act to Follow: Homosexuality in Fiction after Oscar Wilde

Chapter 7: Das Bildnis des Oskar Wilde

Afterword

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Comparative Literature
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612494210
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German
Comparative Cultural Studies Series Editor: Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven

Comparative cultural studies is a contextual approach to the study of culture in a global and intercultural context. It works with a plurality of methods and approaches. The theoretical and methodological framework of comparative cultural studies is built on tenets borrowed from the discipline of comparative literature, the field of cultural studies, and from a range of thought traditions including literary and culture theory, (radical) constructivism, communication theories, and systems theories. In comparative cultural studies the focus is on theory and method as well as application. The monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies publishes single-authored and thematic collected volumes of new scholarship. Manuscripts of books are invited for publication in the series in fields of the study of culture, literature, the arts, media studies, communication studies, the history of ideas, and related disciplines of the humanities and social sciences to the series editor in a word attachment via email at < [e-mail] >. The series is affiliated with CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (ISSN 1481-4374), the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access quarterly published by Purdue University Press at < http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb >.
Volumes in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies include < http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/series/comparative-cultural-studies >
James Patrick Wilper, Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German
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Arianna Dagnino, Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility
Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur
Lauren Rule Maxwell, Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas
Liisa Steinby, Kundera and Modernity
Text and Image in Modern European Culture , Ed. Natasha Grigorian, Thomas Baldwin, and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton
Sheng-mei Ma, Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity
Irene Marques, Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity
Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies , Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári
Hui Zou, A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture
Yi Zheng, From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
Agata Anna Lisiak, Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe
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Michael Goddard, Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form
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Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory , Ed. Galin Tihanov
Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies , Ed. Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek
Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality
Thomas O. Beebee, Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction
Paolo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing
Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature
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Deborah Streifford Reisinger, Crime and Media in Contemporary France
Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German
James Patrick Wilper
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2016 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file at the Library of Congress.
Print ISBN: 978-1-55753-731-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-417-3
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-61249-421-0
Cover image: Punch’s Fancy Portraits, No. 37. By Edward Linley Sambourne. Punch Magazine , 1881. Via Thinkstock, by Getty Images.
To Benjamin
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations
Introduction
Part 1: Religion and Law
Chapter 1 Sin and Crime
Part 2: Greek Love
Chapter 2 Transcending Greek Love
Chapter 3 The “Manly love of comrades”
Part 3: Science and Sex
Chapter 4 The Highest Being Drawn Down into Decadence
Chapter 5 Health, Masculinity, and the Third Sex
Part 4: Wild about Oscar Wilde?
Chapter 6 A Tough Act to Follow: Homosexuality in Fiction after Oscar Wilde
Chapter 7 Das Bildnis des Oskar Wilde
Afterword
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to Heike Bauer and Joanne Leal, for their guidance and encouragement, as well as that I owe to Robert Gillet and Gregory Woods, whose input was essential to bringing this project to fruition.
I would like to thank my partner, Benjamin Nikolay, for his unending support (financial and otherwise) and unfailing patience.
And, last but by no means least, I want to express my gratitude to Purdue University Press and the entire editorial team for enabling me to make this contribution to the scholarly discourse, and special thanks to the Comparative Cultural Studies Series Editor Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and to Production Editor Dianna Gilroy for their assistance and suggestions.
Note on Translations
I have used published translations of German texts when possible; when no such translation exists, translations are my own.
Introduction
Responding to a question about “the Love that dare not speak its name” while on trial in April 1895, Oscar Wilde defended same-sex passions from the witness box, citing Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem “Two Loves” (1894) (Douglas 297). Although this love might not have dared to speak its name in the face of pervasive social and legal condemnation, it was not for lack of options. Rather, in Wilde’s time and in the decades following, names for same-sex love abounded. As scholars and historians of sexuality and homosexuality have shown, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of competing taxonomical and conceptual structures for same-sex desire and sexuality. Concerning the subject of homosexuality, nowhere were the discursive links stronger than between the German- and English-speaking worlds, which took the form of renewed interest in Western traditions of Greek love, the influence of German sexological research into homosexuality on English sexual-reform efforts, and the impact of Oscar Wilde’s trials and conviction for acts of “gross indecency” (i.e., sex acts) with other men upon German writers and homosexual subcultures. This dynamic discursive environment provides the backdrop to the first novels explicitly dealing with love and desire between men.
This study reconsiders the “gay” or homosexual novel in German and English. As Gregory Woods writes, “towards the end of the nineteenth century, at very roughly the same time that the existence of ‘the homosexual’ as a distinct type of individual was being definitely established, the novel started to take over from poetry as the best place in which accessibly to express the quotidian realities of homosexual lives” ( A History of Gay Literature 136). This shift from poetry to the novel, Woods suggests, was part of larger social and cultural trends and the development of the novel as an art form and as “the pre-eminent ‘social’ literary medium of the bourgeois-capitalist era” (136). Late nineteenth-century sexological investigation into same-sex sexuality might have played a role. Harry Oosterhuis posits that the self-narration undertaken by homosexual men and women for sexologists, such as the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, utilized the literary genre of the autobiography: “Krafft-Ebing’s case histories can be viewed as a specific version of the modern (auto)biographical genre as it originated in the eighteenth century and came to full development in the nineteenth century” ( Stepchildren of Nature 216). It is possible that these nonfictional narratives of gay lives led to fictional ones. Although this would be an interesting question, it is not the aim of this study, though, to offer an answer as to why this move from poetry to the novel took place, but rather to explore the themes common to these works.
Claude Summers defines gay fiction as “the fictional representation of male homosexuals by gay male and lesbian writers; the evolution of conceptions about homosexual identity; and the construction, perpetuation, revision, and deconstruction of fictions (including stereotypes and defamations) about homosexuality and homosexuals” ( Gay Fictions 11). Summers gave this definition in 1990, and yet, for the purposes of this study, it still has mileage. Of course, here I limit it to the novel—and for that matter so does Summers, who discusses mostly novels and a few short stories. Hence, I use a broad definition of the gay novel: it is the genre composed of novels in which men who recognized their same-sex desire (regardless of whether they would ascribe to this or a similar term) gave voice to that desire. It explores the development of identities based on same-sex desire, which have fed into modern gay identities, and it is particularly poised to challenge stereotypes and (mis)conceptions about homosexuals.
The present study focuses exclusively on gay male novels. Some of the earliest works of fiction to thematiz