By Cristopher Craft, University of California Press, September 1994

In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?

Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women In Love.

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From the Inside Flap:

"Craft is both ingenious and serious, writing strongly from a familiarity with several appropriate and well-assimilated theoretical traditions. We have already learned a lot from his work, and this vitally written book will be an original and influential contribution."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet

"Craft proves himself a formidable practitioner of the high Jamesian, Wildean, and Proustian style that continues, via Barthes and Derrida, to energize contemporary academic criticism at its most audacious and inventive. . . . A powerful argument not only about the dubious career of the inversion paradigm in Western constructions of same-sex desire but also about our culture's 'chilling cathexis between homosexual desire and death.' This book makes a distinguished and important contribution to gay studies."--Joseph Litvak, author of Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

About the Author:

Christopher Craft lives and works in Berkeley. His essays have appeared in Representations and Genders.

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