The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
EDITED BY BENJAMIN KAHAN
Cambridge UP, 2024
ISBN: 9781108918725
Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.
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Part I - Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality
"The Transmasculinity Narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic Eighteenth Century" By Sal Nicolazzo
"Queering the Founding; Or, the Revolution in Sex" By Don James McLaughlin
"Whither the Queer History of Slavery?" By Patrice D. Douglass
"Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924" By Madoka Kishi
"The Queerness of World War II" By Guy Davidson
"Queer Bonds of Cold War Sexuality" By GerShun Avilez
"'The Dead Never Die': Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, Queer Temporalities, and the Literature of AIDS" By Tim Dean
"Fiction in the Post–Lawrence v. Texas Era, or Inventing Heteronormative Queerness" By Kate McCullough
"Trans-ing Transcendentalism" By Dorri Beam
"Sentimental Literature and the Erotics of Identification" By Kathryn R. Kent
"Queer Modernism and Misfit Identity" By Octavio R. González
"Imperialism and the Queer Harlem Renaissance" By Fiona I. B. Ngô
"The Mystical Sexuality of the Beats and the Berkeley Renaissance" By Julia Bloch and Ignacio Infante
"The New York School’s Queer Happiness" By Brian Glavey
"Chicana and Latina Lesbian Feminists and the Radical Making of Anthological Archives of Willfulness" By T. Jackie Cuevas
"Queer Literature after Queer Theory" By Michael D. Snediker
Part II - Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality
"Queer Historical Poetics and Queer Formalism: American Poetry before 1850" By James Mulholland
"Queer Mythology in American Poetry, 1855–1913" By Vivian R. Pollak
"Funny Emotions: Queer Lyric from the New Verse to the New American Poets" By Chad Bennett
"Queer American Poetry Now" By Stephanie Burt
"Queer American Drama: Plays, Replays, Yet-To-Be-Plays" By Penny Farfan
"The Gay Genre: Musical Theatre from Show Boat to A Strange Loop" By James F. Wilson
"The Oneiric Golden Age of Gay and Lesbian Pulp" By Stephanie Foote
"Queering Desire in American Science Fiction" By Anna Kurowicka
"Queering Comics Histories" By André Carrington
"LGBT Bestsellers" By Diarmuid Hester and Jack Parlett
"History Touches Us Everywhere: American Queer and Trans Memoir in the Long Twentieth Century" By Emma Heaney
"Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre" By Jules Gill-Peterson
"Queer Types for Early Asian American Literature" By Andrew Way Leong
"The Queerness of Blackness" By Amber Jamilla Musser
"Two-Spirit Writers and Queer Native American Literature" By Alicia Carroll
"Queer Southern Literature and the Dirty South" By Michael P. Bibler and Sharon P. Holland
"Queer DiaspoRican Circuits" By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
"'where sadness makes sense': The Queer Poetics of the Midwest Terrain" By Richard T. Rodríguez
"Queer New England Regionalism" By J. Samaine Lockwood
"Queer Beginnings at the End of the Frontier: Asia and the Pacific in the Making of a Modern Gay American Identity" By Amy Sueyoshi
"Queer American Literature in the World" By Marta Figlerowicz
Part III - Queer Methods
"Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy" By Melissa Hardie
"Gender Variance before Trans: A Literary History" By Xine Yao
"Female Friendship: Romantic Friends and Boston Marriages" By Lillian Faderman
"The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing" By Simon Stern
"'Flung out of space': Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" By Aaron S. Lecklider
"Quantifying Sex" By Joan Lubin
"The Pleasures of Reading Camp" By Teagan Bradway
"The Queerness of Religion" By Tracy Fessenden
"Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time" By Ellen Samuels
"Queer Print Culture: The Market and Circulation of Queer Literature" By Jaime Harker
Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago.
