The Cambridge companion to gay and lesbian literature
By: edited by Hugh Stevens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
ISBN-13: 9780521888448
Description: "Literature has always been concerned with questions of kinship, love, marriage, desire, family relationships. The central and privileged stories have tended to assume that desire will be desire between girl and boy. Obstacles are thrown in the way of desire. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1597), the heroine and hero cannot marry because their families, the Montagues and the Capulets, are feuding. The obstacles which stand in the way of same-sex romantic entanglements have been much more encompassing. Before the twentieth century, they have, for the most part, been represented as an impossibility rather than a desirable outcome thwarted by circumstance"--