Queering the Underworld
eBook - PDF

Queering the Underworld

Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

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eBook - PDF

Queering the Underworld

Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

At the start of the twentieth century, tales of "how the other half lives" experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it.In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader's desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.

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Yes, you can access Queering the Underworld by Scott Herring in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Year
2009
ISBN
9780226327921
Topic
Social Sciences
Subtopic
Sociology
Index
Social Sciences

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction: Queer Slumming
  5. Chapter 1. Terra Incognita: Jane Addams, Philanthropic Slumming, and the Elusive Identity of Hull-House
  6. Chapter 2. Willa Cather’s Experiment in Luxury
  7. Chapter 3. “Slightly Known Territory”: Renaissance Admixture and the So-Called Van Vechten School
  8. Chapter 4. Antisapphic Modernism
  9. Epilogue: Secrets of the African-American Bisexual Man; or, Double Lives on the Down Low
  10. Notes
  11. Works Cited
  12. Index