Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 - 338 pagina's In this pathbreaking book, a gay literary critic evaluates a half-century of fictional works "by, for, and about" homosexual men and situates them in the context of an emerging American gay culture. Reed Woodhouse shows how the best gay fiction of the period, like all good literature, not only reflected but anticipated social changes that were afoot -- from the founding of the first enduring gay rights organizations through the Stonewall riots to the ambiguous mainstreaming of homosexuality that continues today. Written in a personal voice, Unlimited Embrace is as much about gay identity as about gay literature. The canon Woodhouse constructs is not merely a list of gay books worth reading, but a guide to "leading a good life as a gay man" as well. In the fiction of Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, James Purdy, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, Ethan Mordden, Dennis Cooper, David Leavitt, and Neil Bartlett, Woodhouse finds intimate glimpses of lives previously veiled in euphemism, slander, and contempt and now striving to take new form. More than that, he raises questions about sexual identity and desire, defiance and wit, that are as relevant to straight readers as to gay ones. Although the book ends with a sober consideration of the literary legacy of AIDS, Unlimited Embrace is more celebration than lament -- an affirmation of the enduring power of literature to shape life. |
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... character . You can't cut characters off from their society and say much about them as individ- uals . You can't say anything meaningful about the mystery of a personality unless you put that personality in a believable and significant ...
... character . If one dislikes him , one is equated with characters in the story who also dislike him - characters who are invariably prudes , rednecks , pathetic losers . Wil- liams , no less conflicted as a man than Baldwin , nonetheless ...
... characters to free - associate - useful on the couch , less so on the page - and the result feels calculated and self - consciously " spontaneous . " By contrast , when he stops . monologuizing and writes sitcom scenes , when the characters ...
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Tennessee Williamss Gay Short Stories | 35 |
2 | 51 |
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