E-Book Overview
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick – and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.
Monica B. Pearl is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK.
E-Book Content
AIDS Literature and Gay Identity
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty fi rst century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick—and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project—lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation. Monica B. Pearl is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
1 Testimony from the Nazi Camps French Women’s Voices Margaret-Anne Hutton 2 Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays Edited by Jo Gill 3 Cold War Literature Writing the Global Conflict Andrew Hammond 4 Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty Andrew John Miller 5 Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction Peta Mitchell 6 Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption Eating the Avant-Garde Michel Delville 7 Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema Jason Borge 8 Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall Ideology, Conflict, and Aesthetics Les Brookes 9 Anglophone Jewish Literature Axel Stähler
10 Before Auschwitz Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France Angela Kershaw 11 Travel and Drugs in TwentiethCentury Literature Lindsey Michael Banco 12 Diary Poetics Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962 Anna Jackson 13 Gender, Ireland and Cul