| Popis: |
This book collects the scholarly work that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. It includes essays that have been previously published in leading journals as well as materials that remained unpublished. Its parts represent the two book projects that See hoped to complete: Queer Natures: Feeling Degenerate in Literary Modernism and Queer Mythologies: Community and Memory in Modern Literature. The first reinterprets the key term nature, central to so many discussions of literature and sexuality. For See, nature is no longer an unchanging substrate or a philosophical given. Relying on a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues instead that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable. Since it makes room for the aesthetic, by way of what Darwin called sexual selection, nature is also affected by feeling. On these grounds, See argues that nature itself might be considered queer. The second project proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. See looks at the ways in which queer community has been imagined in literary works from a wide range of authors, and he analyzes the role that literature has played in providing significant aesthetic versions of that community. Locating the various failures of these myths is a way, he hopes, of approaching another, more successful communal story. In addition to his reading of Darwin, See provides new interpretations of modern writers including Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot. |
