Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Very good and clean. - Sehr gut und sauber. - Well before the formation of the homosexual as a medical category� in the late nineteenth century, English writers attempted to fashion new models of masculinity. Beginning with Tennyson�s In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Dellamora draws on journals, letters, censored texts, and pornography to examine the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian literature. His book is sited at the confluence of three disciplines: Victorian studies, feminist critique, and emergent gay studies. Central to the struggle over the meaning of masculine desire was the institutional politics of Oxford University, where Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were principal players. As a young man in the 1860s, Pater, the art historian, essayist, and novelist, theorized a place for desire between men in cultural formation and critique. Later, in a climate of growing intolerance, he continued to affirm male-male desire but with increasing attention to the social functions of homophobia. Although Dellamora focuses on homosexual culture in the years immediately before the Wilde trials of 1895, he shows that throughout the period discontent with conventional gender roles animated efforts to reimagine the possibilities of masculine existence. Contents: Masculine Desire and the Question of the Subject; Tennyson, the Apostles, and In Memoriam; �Spousal Love� in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Pater at Oxford in 1864: Old Mortality and �Diaphaneite�; Poetic Perversities of A. C. Swinburne; Hopkins, Swinburne, and the Whitmanian Signifier; Arnold, Winckelmann, and Pater; John Ruskin and the Character of Male Genius; Leonardo, Medusa, and the Wish to Be Woman; �The New Chivalry� and Oxford Politics; Theorizing Homophobia: Analysis of Myth in Pater; Homosexual Scandal and Compulsory Heterosexuality in the 1890s; Afterword: The Subject of Sexual (In)difference;. ISBN 9780807818824