The Queer Uncanny

This volume investigates the roles played by the concept of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud and other theorists, in the representation of lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007.

The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic investigates the diverse roles that the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud, Helene Cixous and other theorists, plays in representing lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007. Novels by Christopher Bram, Alan Hollinghurst, Randall Kenan, Shani Mootoo, James Purdy, Sarah Schulman, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and other writers are discussed in the context of queer theory and gothic critical writing. The notion of the uncanny as ‘tangential and to one side’ and ‘appearing on the fringe of something else’, as defined by Cixous and Rosemary Jackson, appropriately evokes the situation of the queer individual living in a minority sub-culture and existing in oblique relation to hetero- normative society. Motifs with uncanny connotations discussed include secrets that society would prefer to remain hidden but come to light, spectral visitation, the emergence of repressed fears and desires, the double, and the homely/ unhomely house. Writers employ them to explore topics integral to queer existence. These include secrets relating to the closet and AIDS; homosexual panic; lesbian social invisibility; transgender subjectivity; the intersection between sexuality and race; the vilification of the queer subject as ‘monstrous Other’; the domestic life of the gay couple destabilised by homophobic influences from the public world; and the heterosexual family disrupted by homosexual secrets from within. The queer recasting of gothic motifs, such as the haunted house, the uncanny city, the grotesque body, and the breakdown of the family due to paternal incest, receives attention.

"In the Closed Room" is a short story about a shy, quiet little girl living in a big city. When her parents are offered the opportunity to take care of a house in the suburbs for the summer she meets another little girl in the house and they become playmates.

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic. Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

NEW YORK TIMES AND NATIONAL BESTSELLER First loves, first songs, and the drugs and reckless high school exploits that fueled them—meet music icons Tegan and Sara as you’ve never known them before in this intimate and raw account of their formative years. High School is the revelatory and unique coming-of-age story of Sara and Tegan Quin, identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, growing up in the height of grunge and rave culture in the ’90s, well before they became the celebrated musicians and global LGBTQ icons we know today. While grappling with their identity and sexuality, often alone, they also faced academic meltdown, their parents’ divorce, and the looming pressure of what might come after high school. Written in alternating chapters from both Tegan’s point of view and Sara’s, the book is a raw account of the drugs, alcohol, love, music, and friendships they explored in their formative years. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, it captures the tangle of discordant and parallel memories of two sisters who grew up in distinct ways even as they lived just down the hall from one another. This is the origin story of Tegan and Sara.

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness," the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion. This is a major critical study that will be welcomed by students and academics but will also be of interest to the general reader.

A poetic debut novel, formally experimental, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny and brutally real. Nochita is tender, fierce, and unforgettable. Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California's counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancée. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope, and an irrepressible wonder. Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive and utterly unforgettable. Praise for Nochita: "Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence."—Mary Gaitskill "In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut."—Janet Fitch "There is a way some writers say hello on the first page that gets me excited to be in their conversation. Nochita has it with teeth!! I love this book and the weird strong eye it has on the world, melting clothes off bodies with a crème brulée torch. Nochita is quite the dance to read through, kind of like shaking a bad morning off and realizing you really love this world. Makes me smile, like Dia Felix writes, 'I think I can latch on to this machine now.' BUY THIS BOOK, don’t just stand there reading my fucking blurb!!"— CAConrad "In the vein of extra-sensitive displaced daughters à la White Oleander, with the crystallized hyper-perception at the center of The Bluest Eye, Nochita is singular, resonant—her pictures get under your skin and stay there; more than lines embedded, here are things you've seen before, numbed and fallen away with the process of becoming adult. Against writers who make a phalanx of accuracy and precision, Felix delivers synesthetic gut-sense in a visual pile-on that picks up and turns over your sense of being human, dirt and M&Ms and kundalini shakti, written by a gifted seer whose inner child is alive and screaming … Nochita brings it down to the roots."—Mila Jaroniec

George Haggerty examines the ways in which gothic fiction centers on loss as the foreclosure of homoerotic possibility and the relationship between transgressive sexual behaviors and a range of religious behaviors understood as 'Catholic'.

Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.