Queer Kinship after Wilde
Transnational Decadence and the Family

Focuses on figures who saw themselves as part of a Decadent tradition as they revised the concept of the family in the early 20th century.

Kristin Mahoney (Author)

9781316519912, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 October 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.55 kg

Queer Kinship after Wilde investigates the afterlife of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period within a global context. Drawing on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, it tells the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who turned to the fin-de-siècle past for inspiration as they attempted to operate outside the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaboration in pursuit of different models of connection that might facilitate their disentanglement from conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde attends to the successes and failures that resulted from these experiments, the new approaches to affiliation inflected by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that occurred within these networks as well as the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.

Part I. Queering Kinship/Kinship as Queer Politics: 1. The son of Oscar Wilde: Cosmopolitanism and textual kinship
2. “Out and out from the family to the community”: The Housmans and the politics of queer sibling devotion
Part II. Queer retreat and cosmopolitan community: 3. An extraordinary marriage: The Mackenzies and the queer cosmopolitanism of Capri
4. Bachelorhood and transnational adoption: Harold Acton in China
Part III. Decadent Modernism and Eroticized Kinship: 5. Richard Bruce Nugent's 'Geisha Man': Harlem decadence, multiraciality, and incest fantasy
6. Hallowed incest: Eric Gill, Indian aesthetics, and queer Catholicism.

Subject Areas: Gay & Lesbian studies [JFSK], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]