In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's "The Bostonians, " Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.
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In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's "The Bostonians, " Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.
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Seller's Description:
Tight binding. Minimal marking on text pages. Previous owner's name on inside front cover. Cover good, bumped corners. Your purchase benefits world-wide relief efforts of Mennonite Central Committee.
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Seller's Description:
Minor rubbing. VG., dustwrapper. 23x15cm, x, 307 pp. Contents: A Polemical Introduction; or, The Ghost of Greta Garbo; First Ed; The Apparitional Lesbian; Sylvia Townsend Warner & the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction; The Diaries of Anne Lister; Marie Antoinette Obsession; Haunted by Olive Chancellor; The Gaiety of Janet Flanner; In Praise of Brigitte Fasbaender (A Musical Emanation).
In a series of essays, Terry Castle, Stanford University Professor of English, considers the phenomenon of the "now you see her, now you don't" lesbian presence in Western literature and culture from the eighteenth century into the twentieth. She includes an essay on The Diaries of Anne Lister, an eighteenth-century woman of means who wrote explicitly about her many affairs with women and examines several people's obsession with Marie Antoinette (often believed to have been lesbian or bisexual). It must be said, however, that Castle's text is not for the faint-hearted; her arguments probe the issues densely and sometimes stretch credibility. I believe she does make her case convincingly: the lesbian, seldom openly acknowledged, often, it seems, retreated from in fear but still, somehow, present, is a haunting figure in Western culture.
