Ruby Sisson Library

Novel Gazing is a collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel.

10 essays discussing the problems of discerning and defining homosexuality in texts of earlier ages. The difficulty arises from historical pressures against writing opening about same-sex emotions and relationships. A comparison of the language of the literary piece to the vocabulary of the era is often analyzed.

"The year was 1994. It was the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and, as luck would have it, the year in which a new magazine called The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review was publishing its first issue. The fact that The G&LR's first year coincided with Stonewall's 25th forever joined the magazine's history with the founding event of the modern LGBT movement. This book commemorates The G&LR's 25th birthday with a collection of relevant articles selected...

This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary-works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others-it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed 'homosexual sodomy' and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq.The book...

While "the male condition" is increasingly the focus of critical inquiry, the first images to come to most minds are those associated, ironically enough, with the resoundingly heterosexual men's movement - sweat lodges, primal screams, etc. As these images quickly become cliched, a more progressive and less primitivist movement continues to gather strength, namely one that examines the experiences and writings of homosexual men. In this groundbreaking...

"The book focuses on the relationship between American and British dramas written by and about gay men and the changing gay culture those plays reflect. From the era of the carefully enforced closet and the coming of liberation politics to the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic and the qualified security of the present era, Still Acting Gay chronicles the transition of the gay man as subject for sensational melodrama to creator of many of the most powerful...

"This major biography of Thomas Gray (1716-1771), the first in nearly half a century, expands our knowledge of the life of the English poet and our understanding of his personality and influential body of works. Robert L. Mack incorporates recent - and often radically revisionary - scholarship on Gray, drawing on developments in eighteenth-century studies and gender studies as well as on extensive original archival research into the life of the poet...