Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay HistoryAt the start of the twentieth century, tales of “how the other half lives” experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it. In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. Queering the Underworld examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader’s desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control. Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and Queering the Underworld will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Jane Addams Philanthropic Slumming and the Elusive Identity of HullHouse | 25 |
Chapter 2 Willa Cathers Experiment in Luxury | 67 |
Renaissance Admixture and the SoCalled Van Vechten School | 104 |
Chapter 4 Antisapphic Modernism | 150 |
Other editions - View all
Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian ... Scott Herring No preview available - 2007 |
Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian ... Scott Herring No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
Addams's adolescent aesthetic American argues artists audience autobiography Barnes's becomes body bohemian Carl Van Vechten Cather chapter Chauncey City closet cosmopolitan critics cultural decadent desire discourses Djuna Barnes Duke University Duke University Press fantasy Fiction gender group identity Hall Harlem Renaissance heteronormative heterosexual homosexual Hull-House ideals identifications immigrant incognito interracial invert Jane Addams lesbian lesbian and gay literary living Loneliness male modern U.S. modernist mysteries narrator Negro Nigger Heaven night Nightwood Nora novel Nugent Paul Paul's perverse philanthropic slummer politics Progressive Era queer slumming queer studies race racial readers reading realism reformer refuses Richard Bruce Nugent same-sex scene sensational sensationalism settlement house sexological sexual group sexual identity slumming literatures slumming narrative slumming venture social sociological spectacular Stephen story streets subculture Thurman tions tramp U.S. sexual underworld urban Vechten Wallace Thurman Willa Willa Cather Winfrey women working-class writings York