Queer Friendship
Male Intimacy in the English Literary Tradition

This book shows how love between men has a rich history in English literature, and explores why these same-sex friendships are memorable.

George E. Haggerty (Author)

9781108418751, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 March 2018

208 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'Haggerty's book opens new possibilities for queer scholarship, which is perhaps its crowning achievement.' Jason S. Farr, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Friendship in the classical world was celebrated as among the highest human achievements: nothing was more likely to lead to the divine than looking for it in the eyes of a friend. In exploring the complexities of male-male relations beyond the simple labels of sexuality, Queer Friendship shows how love between men has a rich and varied history in English literature. The friend could offer a reflection of one's own worth and a celebration of a kind of mutuality that was not connected to family or home. These same-sex friendships are memorable because they give shape to the novels of which they are a part, and question the assumption that the love between friends is different from the love between lovers. Queer Friendship explores English literary friendship in three ways: the elegiac, the erotic, and the platonic, by considering a myriad of works, including Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A. H. H.', and Dickens' Great Expectations.

Introduction: male friendship and Greek love
1. Elegiac friendship
2. Erotic friendship
3. Platonic friendship
Epilogue: queer friendship in Isherwood's A Single Man.

Subject Areas: Gay studies [Gay men JFSK2], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]