The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

This book narrates the history of queer American literature from its earliest beginnings to the present.

Benjamin Kahan (Edited by)

9781108843454, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 June 2024

924 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 4.8 cm, 1.57 kg

'The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature marshals many of the field's most brilliant and influential scholars in order to construct a queer American literary history from as many sharp-eyed perspectives as possible. It spans multiple modes of historiography, attends to manifold configurations of gender and sexual non-normativity as well as racial and ethnic identities, and demonstrates a plethora of methodological approaches. In bringing together these multifarious strategies and focuses, the volume magnificently accomplishes its ambitious goal of representing the queer history of American literature. Yet it is also a refreshingly queer narration of that history, juxtaposing accepted versions of the stories it tells with cutting-edge provocations, canonical figures with those deserving of more attention, and standard notions of what counts as literary with understudied genres.' Aaron J. Stone, Journal of Modern Literature

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Introduction
Part I. Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
The Sexuality of American History: 1. Transatlantic origin stories: the transmasculinity narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic eighteenth century
2. Queering the founding
or, the revolution of sex
3. Whither the queer history of slavery?
4. Queering immigration and the social body, 1875–1924
5. The queerness of WWII: problems and possibilities
6. Queer bonds of Cold War sexuality
7. 'The Dead Never Die': pre-exposure prophylaxis, queer temporalities, and the literature of AIDS
8. Fiction in the post-Lawrence v. Texas era, or inventing heteronormative queerness
Queer Literary Movements: 9.Trans-ing transcendentalism
10. Sentimental literature and the erotics of identification
11. Queer modernism and misfit identity
12. Imperialism and the queer Harlem renaissance
13. The mystical sexuality of the beats and the Berkeley renaissance
14. The New York school's queer happiness
15. Chicana and Latina lesbian feminists and the radical making of anthological archives of willfulness
16. Queer literature after queer theory
Part II: Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
Queer Genre: 17. Queer historical poetics and queer formalism: American poetry before 1850
18. Queer mythology in American poetry, 1855–1913
19. Funny emotions: queer lyric from the new verse to the New American poets
20. Queer American poetry now
21. Queer American drama: plays, replays, yet-to-be-plays
22. The gay genre: musical theatre from Showboat to A Strange Loop
23. The oneiric golden age of gay and lesbian pulp fiction
24. Queering desire in American science fiction
25. Queering comics histories
26. LGBT bestsellers
27. History touches us everywhere: American queer and trans memoir in the long twentieth century
Race and the Politics of Queer and Trans Representation: 28. Whiteness and trans genre, whiteness as trans genre
29. Queer types for early Asian American literature
30. The queerness of Blackness
31. Two-spirit writers and the sovereign erotic in queer Native American literature
32. The insubordination of Latina literature
Space and the Regional Imaginary of Queer Literature: 33. Queer southern literature and the dirty South
34. Queer diaspoRican circuits
35.'where sadness makes sense': the queer poetics of the midwest terrain
36. Queer New England regionalism
37. Queer beginnings at the end of the frontier: Asia and the Pacific in the making of a modern gay American identity
38. Queer American literature in the world
Part III: Queer Methods
How to Recognize the Queer Past Before (and During) the Advent of Medicalization: 39. Repression, sublimation, and latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy
40. Gender variance before trans: a literary history
41. Female friendship: romantic friends and Boston marriages
42. The medical model and early gay and lesbian writing
43. 'Flung out of Space': class and sexuality in American literary history
44. Quantifying sex
45. The pleasures of reading camp
46. The queerness of religion
47. Tracing queer crip poetics in time
48. Queer print culture: the market and circulation of gay and lesbian literature.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]