Deviant modernism
Subtitle: sexual and textual errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust
By: Colleen Lamos.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Cambridge, U.K; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 269
Subjects: Eliot, T. S. 1888-1965 -- Criticism and interpretation; Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922; Joyce, James, 1882-1941; Sexual deviation in literature; Gender identity in literature; Masculinity in literature; Modernism (Literature); Sex in literature; Men in literature
Description: "This original study re-evaluates central texts of the modernist canon - Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. According to modern cultural discourses and psychosexual categorizations, these deviant desires and identifications feminize men or tend to render them homosexual. Colleen Lamos's analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. She argues that canonical male modernism, far from being a monolithic entity with a coherently conservative political agenda, is in fact the site of errant impulses and unresolved struggles. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole and a recognition of the heterogeneous forces that formed and deformed modernism."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 230-262) and index.