Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920

Another Kind of Love offers an historico-literary genealogy of male homosexual desire as it has been represented in English texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities: How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to antecedent formulations such as "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part do literary texts play in the historical constitution of such categorizations of desire, or in a culture's resistance to them? And more urgently for the author: Given that homosexuality has been viewed as the paradigmatic modern "perversion, " what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the putatively "natural" male heterosexual subject? In what ways has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a precarious bulwark against the formidable attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that continues to condemn it? Interdisciplinary in approach, sophisticated and often witty in style, Craft's work pursues these questions along both literary and nonliterary lines. He examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and such pivotal literary texts as Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women in Love. The resulting study, with its focus on "the inescapable obstacles of our passion, " will interest all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading.