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Cover of Monumental anxieties

Monumental anxieties

homoerotic desire and feminine influence in 19th century U.S. literature

By Scott S. Derrick

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Publish Date

1997

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Language

eng

Pages

259

Description:

Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. Critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century. Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore an ongoing compositional crisis in which a series of male authors struggle to accommodate identity-threatening desires, and yet consolidate literature as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise.