Maybe I'm just not in the right headspace for this article. Maybe it simply isn't operating on my wavelength. But I found it incoherent and boring (and of only tenuous connection to either "literature" or "gay and lesbian"). Sorry about that.
I'll wrap up this book with another post that simply lists the chapters that I didn't cover due to falling entirely within the 20th century. Then on to something more interesting!
In an odd way, I felt that this chapter did a disservice to its topic by expanding the scope of "queerness" so far beyond the more default meaning in the collection, as if the author couldn't think of enough to say in a chapter on Black writing in a collection about gay and lesbian literature and felt the need to pad it out.
This weekend I rose at an ungodly hour of the morning to attend a 2-day online conference of research into Anne Lister and her world. Recordings of sessions (this year and past years) are available through the main conference web page. In the sidebar, under each year’s conference, select the “resources” tab to find them. I plan to check out some of the previous sessions when I have time—in particular, a session from last year on vocabulary that Lister used around sex, and other sexual vocabulary of the time.
Considering the significant presence of literature (and literary personalities) in the construction of "romantic friendship," no single chapter is going to give more than a teaser on the topic. After this, there are two more chapters that fall within the pre-20th century scope of the Project, then I'll probably have one final entry that simply lists the titles of the later articles. I'd meant to finish this up a bit more promptly, but the day-job has been grueling for the last couple weeks.
(Originally aired 2023/10/07 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2023.
Publications on the Blog
OK, this is that weird out-of-order article on gothic literature from The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. I posted it previoiusly as a simple blog item and now it's repeated as a regular LHMP entry. Sorry for the redundancy, but it's how I keep my life organized in systematic fashion.
Another chapter from The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature that gives only a passing nod to the existence of women as anything other than an adjunct to men't lives. I'd meant to push on more rapidly with these, but unexpectedly my day-job wanted me on-site for most of the week. And so it goes. Next up is the chapter on gothic literature that I already posted, which will be re-posted within the LHMP framework.
Hey, my blog, my rules. If an article in a collection is pretty much designed to ignore the existence of women, then I'm not going to spend a lot of pixels on it unless it's genuinely snark-worthy.
I thought a lot about my podcast series on favorite tropes while summarizing this article. Particularly about gendered tropes. I have several topics on the to-do list for that series that deal with pairings of character types such as "the rake and the wallflower" which feed nicely into the question of how such tropes work differently for female couples. There were a couple of references for this chapter that touch on the category of "female rake" that I'll need to track down for when I address that character trope in the podcast.
