The stories gathered here explore the vagaries of sexual desire, gender identity, and erotic attachment, revealing the surprising queerness of nineteenth-century American literature.
Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States.
"A marvelously heterodox collection of American shorter fiction
from the long nineteenth century."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"Looby's contribution is nothing short of game-changing . . . [A]
scintillating collection of short stories . . . It is hard not to
marvel at the range of queer stories Looby has collected here.
Almost all somehow trouble the nineteenth century's foundational
ideas about gender and domesticity."
*GLQ*
"Looby’s anthology brings together several stunning narrative
experiments that challenge any normative description of
nineteenth-century literary aesthetics. It is a treasure to have at
one’s fingertips so many piercing exceptions to the patriarchal
metanarratives of American literary production...It challenges the
reader to confront historical desire in all its alterity,
nonconformity, and violent intensity. Queer readers may come to
these stories looking for our predecessors, but we instead find
something as hard and uncanny as human bone."
*ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830*
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