Synopses & Reviews
Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending
Synopsis
Fin de siécle: the phrase evokes at once a sense of decadence, deviant sexuality, and fears that history is coming to an end. For gays, the ends of centuries carry an even greater fear of real endings as they contemplate the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 and the onset of AIDS just a decade ago. By considering apocalyptic thinking and crises in masculine representation together, Richard Dellamora lets us see what was--and is--at stake in the fin de siécle definitions of gay identity. Issues dominating male homosexual subcultures in the 1890s are still reverberate in our own day and predetermine agendas in the gay community.
Dellamora links 19th-century writers not only with E.M. Forster at the turn of the century but also with such contemporary novelists and theorists as Edmund White, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Foucault. Apocalyptic Overtures provides a provocative new context for thinking about gender, literature, and society.