Picturing the Closet takes a pioneering approach to visual culture and by so doing builds on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet in order to present a compelling new approach to the British experience of queer culture since the eighteenth century.

Lexie Smithson’s family had never been what most folks would call “normal”. They had more than their fair share of oddballs and loners and even crazy cat ladies. Most families in Mossy Creek did, especially if they lived on the “wrong side of the tracks”. But things took a decidedly sharp turn to the left of weird the day Lexie’s sister came home from school, complaining about how Old Serena Duchamp had given her the evil eye. When her mother decided it would be a good thing to confront the town’s resident witch, Lexie knew life would never be the same. How could it when their loved ones began returning to the old homestead the day after their funerals. Lexie knew she should be happy none of her neighbors reported mutilated cattle or corpses with missing brains. But that can be hard to do when your loved ones have passed but not passed on. Skeletons in the Closet is a novella set in the Eerie Side of the Tracks universe. It is the first of a series featuring Lexie, her family – both living and dead, not to mention furry – and their friends.

In this unique intervention in the study of queer culture, Dominic Janes highlights that, under the gaze of social conservatism, 'gay' life was hiding in plain sight. Indeed, he argues that the worlds of glamour, fashion, art and countercultural style provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle in London. Inspired by the legacies of Oscar Wilde, interwar and later 20th-century men such as Cecil Beaton expressed transgressive desires in forms inspired by those labelled 'freaks' and, thereby, made major contributions to the histories of art, design, fashion, sexuality, and celebrity. Janes reinterprets the origins of gay and queer cultures by charting the interactions between marginalized freaks and chic fashionistas. He establishes a new framework for future analyses of other cities and media, and of the roles of women and diverse identities.

This is the first edited collection of essays on the nineteenth-century diarist Anne Lister. Now recognized as a UNESCO world heritage document, Lister's five-million-word diaries are paradigm-shifting in terms of their range of material, from social commentary and politics to breath-taking travel accounts. However, they have become most well-known for their explicit descriptions of same-sex practices, written in code and constituting a significant portion of their content. The essays here address the variety and interdisciplinarity of the diaries: Lister's negotiations with her own 'odd' identity, her multiple same-sex relationships, her involvement in politics and her lifelong thirst for knowledge. It also addresses Lister studies in popular culture through the successful Gentleman Jack BBC-HBO series, including an interview with Sally Wainwright and foreword by author Emma Donoghue. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Queering the Interior problematizes the familiar space of ‘home’. It deploys a queer lens to view domestic interiors and conventions and uncovers some of the complexities of homemaking for queer people.Each of the book’s six sections focuses on a different room or space inside the home. The journey starts with entryways, and continues through kitchens, living spaces, bedrooms, bathrooms, and finally, closets and studies. In each case up to three specialists bring their disciplinary expertise and queer perspectives to bear. The result is a fascinating collection of essays by scholars from literary studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, history and art history. The contributors use historical and sociological case studies; spatial, art and literary analyses; interviews; and experimental visual approaches to deliver fresh, detailed and grounded perspectives on the home and its queer dimensions. A highly creative approach to the analysis of domestic spaces, Queering the Interior makes an important contribution to the fields of gender studies, social and cultural history, cultural studies, design, architecture, anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography.

With all the heated debates around religion and homosexuality today, it might be hard to see the two as anything but antagonistic. But in this book, Dominic Janes reveals the opposite: Catholic forms of Christianity, he explains, played a key role in the evolution of the culture and visual expression of homosexuality and male same-sex desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He explores this relationship through the idea of queer martyrdom—closeted queer servitude to Christ—a concept that allowed a certain degree of latitude for the development of same-sex desire. Janes finds the beginnings of queer martyrdom in the nineteenth-century Church of England and the controversies over Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sexuality. He then considers how liturgical expression of queer desire in the Victorian Eucharist provided inspiration for artists looking to communicate their own feelings of sexual deviance. After looking at Victorian monasteries as queer families, he analyzes how the Biblical story of David and Jonathan could be used to create forms of same-sex partnerships. Finally, he delves into how artists and writers employed ecclesiastical material culture to further queer self-expression, concluding with studies of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman that illustrate both the limitations and ongoing significance of Christianity as an inspiration for expressions of homoerotic desire. Providing historical context to help us reevaluate the current furor over homosexuality in the Church, this fascinating book brings to light the myriad ways that modern churches and openly gay men and women can learn from the wealth of each other’s cultural and spiritual experience.

That there is a queeras opposed to merely homosexualhistory before Oscar Wilde will come as news to many in the sexuality studies field. Oscar Wilde Prefigured. It turns out that there is indeed a history of queerness, and that is originated in the early 18th century, coming to a head, as it were, by the end of the 19th. Dominic Janes draws on lots of new historical material, especially parodies and stereotypes in caricatures of sodomy and effeminacy. Front and center, then, are the 18th-century macaronies and mollies and men of feeling, the Regency dandies, and Victorian aesthetes. Visual display become a powerful historical tableau, generating a long history of queerness/homosexuality via caricatures of allegedly effeminate types. Images of effeminacy became a cultural field in which same-sex desire could be expressed. Wilde, then, was not the starting-point of public gay figures, but the endpoint. Wilde, in turn, is the pivot for connecting the Georgian figures to 20th-century stereotypes of camp (think Liberace), using images drawn from theater, fashion, and popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics and queer culture."

In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages'. The influence on Victorian culture of the 'Middle Ages' (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance) was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This 'medievalism' led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders being acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically 'Victorian'—in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on a Gothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to their homes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of 'medievalism' in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature, politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India, amongst other places.

Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, family and marriage, the intersections of sexuality with race and class, male and female homoerotic relations, trans and gender variant sexuality, the sale of sex, sexual violence, sexual science, sexuality and emotion, erotic art and literature, and the material culture of sexuality.

Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick as Book Artist represents the first book-length study to explore the intersections of Sedgwick's critical writing, poetry, and, most importantly, book art, making the case that her art criticism, especially her meditations on domestic and nineteenth-century photography, and "artist's book" projects are as formally complex and brilliant, conceptually significant and life-changing, as her literary criticism and theory. In addition, the book represents a significant intervention into recent debates about reparative reading, surface reading, and the descriptive turn across the humanities, because of its sustained, positive accounts on Sedgwick's books as visual, textural, and material objects. The book ranges across Sedgwick's published output, from The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980) to the posthumously published The Weather in Proust (2011), and features her meditations on a wide variety of art-historical topoi, including Judith Scott's queer/crip fiber art; the anality of Polykleitos's Doryphorus; queer Modernist typography; Piranesi's punitive space; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's queer holy family; Manet's frontality and thalassic aesthetics; fat and thin aesthetics of various stripes; and the queer photography of Anna Atkins, Clementina Hawarden, and Julia Margaret Cameron; Baron De Mayer, Eugene Atget, and P.H. Emerson; as well as David Hockney, Ken Brown, and her own father, a NASA lunar photographer. The book climaxes with two chapter-length explorations of Sedgwick's own late-life book-art practice: her panda Valentine alphabet cards (c. 1996) and her Last Days of Pompeii/Cavafy unique artist's book (c. 2007). Jason Edwards is a Professor of Art History at the University of York, where he works at the intersections of queer and vegan theory, and on British art history in its global contexts in the period from c.1760-1940. He is the author of the Routledge Critical Thinkers volume on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Routledge, 2009) as well as the editor of Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick As a Poet (punctum books, 2017), which includes Sedgwick's uncollected poems. In addition, Jason is also the author of Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism (Ashgate 2006), and the co-editor of special issues of journals and edited collections on Grinling Gibbons, Joseph Cornell, the British School of Sculpture c.1760-1832, Victorian sculpture in its global contexts, the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic interiors, and homoeroticism, art and aestheticism in Victorian Britain. Jason has also co-curated exhibitions on Turner's whaling imagery, Alfred Gilbert, and Victorian sculpture more broadly, at Tate Britain, the Yale Center for British Art, Hull Maritime Museum, Lotherton Hall, and the Henry Moore Institute for the Study of Sculpture, in Leeds. Jason's forthcoming book Queer Craft deals with Sedgwick's work as a fiber artist.