The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In so doing, it delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

In the last two decades, lesbian and gay studies have transformed literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing introduces readers to important concepts, methods and cultural and historical debates relevant to the study of sexuality and literature.

"Writing anything definitive about the queer American novel will always be unsatisfying, if not impossible. Unsatisfying, because the romances they contain are uncertain and, quite often, doomed: heartbreak, violence, and persecution pepper nearly every page. Impossible, because the genre's terrain is as vast and uncertain as America itself: the spaces, the characters, plots, ideas, and dynamics - too varied. The minute you say one thing, you could say another. And perhaps that might be the point. As one character from Djuna Barnes's lesbian novel Nightwood puts it, "With an American anything can be done.'"1 We could say the same about the queer American novel. If there is anything consistently connecting this genre, it is that it features, however obliquely, the effects characters (usually American, but not always) have as they seek reasons for why they have sexual feelings for those that are not obvious or traditional object choices. Frequently, these effects instruct characters in their pursuit of self-knowledge and self-understanding, especially if others have pathologized their desires (and America has and does pathologize its queers). In her autobiographical graphic memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel tells a story of a variety of discoveries that books, explicitly queer or not, can inspire. During the same afternoon when she acknowledges that she is a "lesbian," she also finds herself asking a professor to let her take his course on James Joyce's Ulysses - her father's favorite book. As we move from the captions and the meticulous, stylized drawings, canonical books acquire an increasingly important role: books become guides to how Bechdel will affect "a convergence" with her "abstracted father.""--

For a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction offers an original and much-needed study of Irish Lesbian fiction. Evaluating a wide body of Irish lesbian fiction ranging from the Victorian era to the contemporary age, this book advocates for women writers who have been largely ignored in Irish literary history and criticism. This volume examines the use and applications of space in Irish lesbian fiction. In recent years, it can be argued that Irish society has created a new ‘space’ for LGBT or queer people. The concept of space is, thus, important both symbolically and physically for lesbian literature. In asking, if Irish women writers have moved ‘out of the shadows’ so to speak, what space is open to the Irish lesbian author? How is spatiality reflected in lesbian representation throughout Irish literary history? Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction examines a diverse range of writers from the nineteenth century to the contemporary age, evaluating the contributions of largely unknown authors who have been overlooked alongside more established voices within Irish literature. The concept of liminality that this volume takes as its theme and focus engage with notions of intersectionality, thresholds, crossings and transitions. In suggesting the overlap between the indeterminate threshold of the liminal space and its ambiguously queer potentiality to examine the dynamics of space and its relationship to lesbianism, this ground-breaking project both locates and charts spaces of queer liminality in Irish lesbian fiction.

A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In so doing, it delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.