Explore the vast range of titles available.

The main aim of this essay is to assess the impact of Oscar Wilde’s trials on neo-Victorian representations of same-sex desire between men. Throughout the text, I argue that the consequences of Wilde’s imprisonment have become a haunting presence that still pervades how male sexual dissidence is represented in neo-Victorian novels. The works examined in this essay are therefore considered differently than those which portray sapphic relationships or other forms of non-heterosexual desires. Ultimately, I argue that a new trend within neo-Victorianism, in which fantasy elements are intertwined with queer desire among men, could offer a new way of portraying same-sex desire between men; this new portrayal could be more in compliance with the political, cultural, and social agenda of neo-Victorianism. Through a brief analysis of Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and a more in-depth exploration of Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light, I conclude that fantasy may—if the writer wishes it—allow a portrayal of queer desire that overcomes many of the traumatising and haunting obstacles which resulted from Wilde’s plight.

Shame has often been considered a threat to democratic politics, and was used to degrade and debase sex radicals and political marginals. But certain forms of shame were also embraced by 19th-century activists in an attempt to reverse entrenched power dynamics. Bogdan Popa brings together Rancière’s techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists denaturalised conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender. This study fills a glaring absence in political theory by undertaking a genealogy of radical queer interventions that predate the 20th century.

This paper addresses the potential relationship between corporality, abjection, and hope in Oscar Wilde’s “Charmides” (1881). The main aim of inspecting this connection is to establish how Wilde makes use of abjection in order to defend the idea that sexual dissidence can, indeed, offer the possibility of hope. In other words, the paper focuses on how Wilde describes abject bodies and abject bodily acts in the poem in a way that ultimately defies the social and moral conventions of his period. It argues that acts that may be considered abject –such as same-sex desire– can be hopeful when addressed from a different perspective. This paper hopes to establish a clear connection between the poem, the abject, and Wilde’s defiance of the sexual mores of his period.

\"Dowling's compact and intelligently argued study is concerned with the late-Victorian emergence of homosexuality as an identity rather than as an activity... [This identity] was formed out of notions of Hellenism current in mid-century Oxford that were held to be lofty and ennobling and even a kind of substitute for a waning Christianity.\"-Nineteenth- Century Literature\"Dowling's study is an exceptionally clear-headed and far-reaching analysis of the way Greek studies operated as a 'homosexual code' during the great age of English university reform... Beautifully written and argued with subtlety, the book is indispensable for students of Victorian literature, culture, gender studies, and the nature of social change.\"-Choice\"Hellenism and Homosexuality... presents a detailed and knowledgeable... account of such factors as the Oxford Movement and the influence of such Victorian dons as Jowett and Pater and the evolving evaluations of Classical Greece, its mores and morals. It is also enhanced by [an] analysis of Greek terminology with homosexual connotations, as to be found, for instance, in Plato's Republic.\"-Lambda Book Report

The potential influence of Dinah Mulock Craik on Oscar Wilde's fairy tales has been often remarked but seldom analyzed. This article suggests that Wilde enters a dynamic engagement with Craik's literary fairy tales, particularly in their shared critique of nineteenth-century notions of deviance and wholeness. Locating these texts at the intersection of disability studies and queer theory, this article uses Margaret Price's conception of bodymind to read Craik's The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak (1875) and Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891) as a complex literary encounter that subverts ableist assumptions regarding \"a sound mind in a sound body.\"

The titular antagonists of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) embody a queer repudiation of reproductive futurity through an erotic logic that ends not in reproduction but in monstrous consumption. Existing across and recalling a vast history, the characters of Dracula and the Beetle stand in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siècle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts—one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries—initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject.

This essay outlines how Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) illuminates the challenges involved in doing queer history. Waters' lesbian historical novel queries the 'official' historical record and reflects on a fundamental tension in queer historical research; the distinction drawn between social constructedness and essentialism, alterity and continuity. Through playful re enactment of the work of the academic researcher, the novel protests against being read as an authentic depiction of Victorian lesbian sexuality. Instead, it offers a postmodern metafictional response to the field of queer history, which broadens the questions we ask of the discipline. By enacting the process of historical study in this Neo-Victorian novel, Waters explores the complexities of reading for queerness in the past. I argue that Waters' engagement with embodied reality represents an innovative intervention in queer historiography. The erotic is mobilised in this novel to collapse the distinction between alterity and continuity, admitting the affective dimensions of queer research. Tipping the Velvet addresses the tensions between some forms of lesbian feminist theory and queer theory, demonstrating the inextricability of queerly gendered subjectivities and lesbian erotics. In this engagement with erotic reading practices, Waters explores the inadequacies of linguistic and textual representation. This essay concludes that cultural productions such as the queer historical novel reach towards a queerer historiography, enabling \"touches across time\" (Dinshaw, 1999) that have a crucial role to play in contemporary theorising of gender and sexuality and community-formation for queer people in the present.

Lytton Strachey's private correspondence turns continually to tropes of rediscovery and exhumation. Having made serious effort to arrange and preserve his letters for posterity, Strachey desperately hoped that they would one day be read by future generations. At the heart of this desire was the specter of his self-identified, but during his lifetime publicly undisclosed, homosexuality. As he negotiated the privacy of queer life in the early twentieth century, Strachey fantasized about a world “a hundred years hence” when his letters could finally be made public. The practice of letter writing worked for him as a way to insert himself into that imagined future, sustaining the illusion of a queer touch across time.

Cultural expressions of Orientalism, the Gothic, and the queer are rarely studied together, though they share uncanny features including spectrality, doubling, and the return of the repressed. An ideal means of investigating these common aspects is neo-Victorian translation, which is likewise uncanny. The neo-Victorian Gothic cable television series Penny Dreadful, set mostly in fin-de-siècle London, employs the character Ferdinand Lyle, a closeted queer Egyptologist and linguist, to depict translation as both interpretation and transformation, thereby simultaneously replicating and challenging late-Victorian attitudes toward queerness and Orientalism.

Charles Worth, founder of the modern couture system of fashion production, scandalized his contemporaries with his incursion into the sphere of women's dress. The satirical, hostile journalistic accounts of Worth, from his rise to fame in the 1860s through his death in 1895, suggest that “the great man-milliner” escalated Victorian anxieties about gender and value. Simultaneously, the memoirs of Worth's fans reveal the genesis of a species of cross-gender relationship between designer and clients that is chaste but enamored, controlling but also collaborative. Reading across these opposing perspectives, I argue that Worth embodies a queer Victorian masculinity based not in sexual preference or effeminacy but in social and material relations to women, and that the opulence of his work transcends the boundary between fashion and art.