Victorian sexual dissidence

"Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework - while refining and resisting it in places - to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today.

One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects."--Pub. desc.

"Still burning from this strangling embrace": Vernon Lee on desire and aesthetics / Kathy Psomiades -- Greek Maenads, Victorian spinsters / Yopie Prins -- The adolescent boy: fin-de-siècle femme fatale? / Martha Vicinus -- Victorian effeminacies / Thaïs Morgan -- Production, reproduction, and pleasure in Victorian aesthetics and economics / Regenia Gagnier -- "Men of my own sex": genius, sexuality, and George Du Maurier's artists / Dennis Denisoff -- "Desire without limit": dissident confession in Oscar Wilde's De Profundis / Oliver Buckton -- The elusive queerness of Henry James's "Queer comrade": reading Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse / Eric Haralson -- George Santayana and the beauty of friendship / Christopher Lane -- Ten percent: poetry and pathology / Robert Sulcer -- The romance of boys bathing: poetic precedents and respondents to the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke / Julia Saville -- The dance of life: choreographing sexual dissidence in the early twentieth century / Andrew Hewitt.