Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives

by Gallagher, Lowell; Roden, Frederick S.; Smith, Patricia Juliana

• ISBN13: 9780230008311
• ISBN10: 0230008313
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-09
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This new volume of essays examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality. Why did so many literary Modernists embrace Catholicism? What is their relationship between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Britain to America and France, Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality. The result is a radical revision of the sacred - in life and art, the body and devotion.

Author Biography

LOWELL GALLAGHER is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance as well as numerous articles on early modern English Catholicism, Shakespeare and postmodern ethics.

FREDERICK S. RODEN is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture and the editor of Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies.

PATRICIA JULIANA SMITH is Assistant Professor of English at Hofstra University. She is author of Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fictions and has edited En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera; The Queer Sixties and The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Notes on Contributors	p. xi
Introduction: the Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms	p. 1
Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism	p. 19
The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction	p. 33
Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity	p. 57
Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	p. 69
"Uncovenanted Joys": Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees' Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists	p. 85
The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider: Catholicism and Sexuality in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop	p. 97
The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence	p. 114
"The Woman That God Forgot": Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood	p. 129
"A Twitch Upon the Thread": Revisiting Brideshead Revisited	p. 149
The Altar of the Soul: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green	p. 163
Notes	p. 184
Index	p. 206
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.