Queer Gothic

by Haggerty, George E.

• ISBN13: 9780252073533
• ISBN10: 0252073533
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-24
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Because gothic fiction was the one semi-respectable genre that regularly explored sexual and social transgressions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, George Haggerty's Queer Gothic argues that it makes sense to consider the ways in which gothic fiction itself helped to shape thinking about sexual matters, create the darker shadows of the dominant fiction, and jump-start the age of sexology. Haggerty examines a variety of issues, including the ways in which gothic fiction centers on loss as the foreclosure of homoerotic possibility, the uses to which same-sex desire can be put in a patriarchal culture, and the relationship between transgressive sexual behaviors and a range of religious behaviors understood as "Catholic." Other chapters consider the erotic implications of gothic millenialism and move beyond the eighteenth century to discuss gothic fiction in the 1890s and 1990s, including Henry James's The Ambassadors, Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
Part 1. Gothic Sexuality
Gothic Fiction and the History of Sexuality	9	(12)
Gothic Fiction and the Erotics of Loss	21	(24)
``Dung, Guts, and Blood'': Sodomy, Abjection, and the Gothic	45	(18)
Part 2. Gothic Culture
The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction	63	(21)
Psychodrama: Hypertheatricality and Sexual Excess on the Gothic Stage	84	(24)
``The End of History'': Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic	108	(23)
Part 3. Gothic Fictions and the Queering of Culture
``Queer Company'': The Turn of the Screw and the Haunting of Hill House	131	(20)
``Queerer Knowledge'': Lambert Strether and Tom Ripley	151	(34)
Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture	185	(16)
Afterword	201	(4)
Notes	205	(22)
Index	227