num_pages: 0
description: This text examines how and why effeminacy and empire were so very much at odds at the time of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895. Exploring the late-Victorian association of effeminate behaviour with male homosexual identity Joseph Bristow looks at how a number of gay writers negotiated the stigma attached to the man-loving man of letters. Chapters examine in turn Wilde's fatal effeminacy the effeminophobic narratives of E.M. Forster the Anglophobic camp effeminacy of Ronald Firbank and the structures of sexual self-identification in the autobiographical writings of John Addington Symonds J.R. Ackerley Jocelyn Brooke and Quentin Crisp. A short coda investigates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on this tradition of gay men's writing discussing in particular Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Swimming-Pool Library.
language: English
title: Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885
publisher: Open University Press