Synopses & Reviews
Mainstream academic criticism has usually failed to engage gay work without distorting or ignoring its most central features. In gay men's writing, tenderness lies side by side with rage, and existential rejection of convention rubs shoulders with sexual hedonism. This groundbreaking work takes us on an unprecedented tour--in clear, lively, and non-technical language--of classic and little-known texts from the perspective of gay experience, sensibility, and desire.
Beginning with Wilde's and Byron's existentialist outlaw, the theme of social rebellion and the fight against conformity forms a common link among the literary works of the twentieth century. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century presents us with a unified analysis of these, and other, shared themes in the works of James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Jean Genet, Joe Orton, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, and Constantine Cavafy, and in the love poetry of the first world war.
This is the most unified treatment of gay men's writing to date, written to appeal to the general reader, but based on scholarship so original that it is vital reading for anyone interested in gay studies and gender studies.
Review
"As a history of behavioral psychology, . . . the book is excellent."-American Journal of Psychology,
Review
"A brilliant exposition of American psychology's historic and profound ambivalence towards its dreams of technologies of control . . . This book will surely signal a turning point in our historical understanding of behaviorism."-Henderikus J. Stam,editor, Theory and Psychology,/i>
Review
"Control, a strongly written work of careful scholarship, will be a critical part of that continuing discussion and it deserves the attention of all historians of the discipline. Readers will be rewarded with important insights." -Theory and Psychology,
Review
"[A] highly readable, at times entertaining, yet eminently scholarly book." -History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin,
Synopsis
Behaviorism has been the dominant force in the creation of modern American psychology. However, the unquestioned and unquestioning nature of this dominance has obfuscated the complexity of behaviorism.
Control serves as an antidote to this historical myopia, providing the most comprehensive history of behaviorism yet written. Mills successfully balances the investigation of individual theorists and their contributions with analysis of the structures of assumption which underlie all behaviorist psychology, and with behaviorism's role as both creator and creature of larger American intellectual patterns, practices, and values.
Furthermore, Mills provides a cogent critique of behaviorists' narrow attitudes toward human motivation, exploring how their positivism cripples their ability to account for the unobservable, inner factors that control behavior. Control's blend of history and criticism advances our understanding not only of behaviorism, but also the development of social science and positivism in twentieth-century America.
About the Author
Mark Lilly is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tunis and the editor of Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Texts.