An Introduction To Queer Literary Studies

An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly is the first introduction to queer theory written especially for students of literature. Tracking the emergence of queer theory out of gay and lesbian studies, this book pays unique attention to how queer scholars have read some of the most well-known works in the English language. Organized thematically, this book explores queer theoretical treatments of sexual identity, gender and sexual norms and normativity, negativity and utopianism, economics and neoliberalism, and AIDS activism and disability. Each chapter expounds upon foundational works in queer theory by scholars including Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Each chapter also offers readings of primary texts –ranging from the highly canonical, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to more contemporary works of popular fiction, like Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. Along the way, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly demonstrates how queer reading methods work alongside other methods like feminism, historicism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. By modelling queer readings, this book invites literature students to develop queer readings of their own. It also suggests that reading queerly is not simply a matter of reading work written by queer people. Queer reading attunes us to the queerness of even the most straightforward text.

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The collection is edited by two of the leading scholars in the field and presents: individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contexts essays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borders writings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

After Queer Studies centers the literature and critical practices that instigated queer studies and charts trajectories for its further evolution.

This book begins by putting gay & lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged.

Oscillations of Literary Theory offers a new psychoanalytic approach to reading literature queerly, one that implicates queer theory without depending on explicit representations of sex or queer identities. By focusing on desire and identifications, A. C. Facundo argues that readers can enjoy the text through a variety of rhythms between two (eroticized) positions: the paranoid imperative and queer reparative. Facundo examines the metaphor of rupture as central to the logic of critique, particularly the project to undo conventional formations of identity and power. To show how readers can rebuild their relational worlds after the rupture, Facundo looks to the themes of the desire for omniscience, the queer pleasure of the text, loss and letting go, and the vanishing points that structure thinking. Analyses of Nabokov's Lolita, Danielewski's House of Leaves, Findley's The Wars, and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are included, which model this new approach to reading.

The fourth edition of this classic beginner’s guide to literary studies has been fully updated throughout. Mario Klarer offers a concise and accessible discussion of central issues in English and world literature as well as film and television series. Starting with the basics of what constitutes a literary text, the book moves through an analysis of major genres, important periods, and key theoretical approaches to literature and film. It also looks at the practicalities of finding and referencing secondary sources when writing a research paper. The expanded new edition has been updated to include: a wider range of examples from world literature, cinema, and television series additional references to contemporary streaming formats updated chapters on postcolonial theory, cultural studies, gender theory, feminism, and queer theory new sections on digital humanities, ecocriticism, literary translations, and paratexts extended explanations of traditional genres, e.g., the epic, drama, and poetry a completely revised chapter on the most recent MLA guidelines with rules for citing new media formats The detailed glossary ensures that the book is accessible to readers of any level, making this an ideal self-study guide or a course book for Introduction to Literature classes.

Was Shakespeare gay? Is The Merchant of Venice anti-semitic? How does mainstream reading differ from that of subcultural groups? How does the formal study of literature handle such questions? In this lively and readable book, Alan Sinfield engages, freely, provocatively, and wittily, with topics such as the gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War, and the history of cultural materialism, and discusses figures such as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde, Thom Gunn and Jeanette Winterson. Sinfield boldly and persuasively challenges the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature, investigates the principles and practice that may inform dissident reading, and ultimately argues that lesbian and gay intellectuals should cultivate an allegiance beyond the academy. Cultural Politics-Queer Reading is a lively and accessible account of cultural materialism written by a leading and controversial student of contemporary cultural politics. It intervenes in current debates in critical theory and in gender, ethnic, and cultural studies, and sets the agenda for a truly political lesbian and gay studies.

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this volume foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media. This book traces the intellectual and political emergence of queer studies, addresses relevant critical debates in the field, provides an overview of queer approaches to genres, and explains how queer approaches have transformed understandings of key concepts in multiple fields.