Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments addresses a longstanding question in literary and cultural studies: how can a case be made for the ongoing value of the humanities without an articulation of that field's social effects? In response, this book examines how readers "befriend" works of literature, overtures that are based in a curiosity about the world that help those readers to appreciate the world anew. As an instance of this dynamic, it examines how the contemporary social interest in queerness can be contextualized through encounters with texts produced during an earlier era of queer flux: the U.S. nineteenth century. The book offers first-hand accounts of such meetings, weaving within its analysis reports on readers' engagements with literature and the consequences of those connections. It frames such dynamics as central to a new politics, or to finding a vocabulary for a familiar politics that has not received its due.

The Routledge History of Queer America presents the first comprehensive synthesis of the rapidly developing field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer US history. Featuring nearly thirty chapters on essential subjects and themes from colonial times through the present, this collection covers topics including: Rural vs. urban queer histories Gender and sexual diversity in early American history Intersectionality, exploring queerness in association with issues of race and class Queerness and American capitalism The rise of queer histories, archives, and collective memory Transnationalism and queer history Gathering authorities in the field to define the ways in which sexual and gender diversity have contributed to the dynamics of American society, culture and nation, The Routledge History of Queer America is the finest available overview of the rich history of queer experience in US history.

A fresh examination of this forbidden history shows the profound effects of gay culture on modern life. Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance.

Examine how a community of support in Nineteenth-Century Paris became a blueprint for modern sexual identity! A unique social history, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is a valuable addition to the growing field of gay and lesbian studies. The book examines the interaction between the city's male homosexual subculture and Parisian authority figures who attempted to maintain political and social order during the early years of the French Third Republic by using laws against public indecency and sexual assault to treat same-sex sexuality as a crime. Faced with a constant cycle of surveillance, harassment, and arrest, the city's gay men survived the hostile urban environment by forming a community of support that had a widespread and lasting influence on the development of modern sexual identities. Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is based on a statistical analysis of more than 800 working-class and middle-class men who were arrested or investigated by Parisian police between 1873 and 1879. Their stories, presented through long and short case studies, represent nearly 2,000 names recorded by police in “Pederasts and Others,” a ledger detailing the arrests of male homosexuals for public offenses against decency and other minor offenses. (The term “pederast” identified those suspected of same-sex sexual activity, not the modern definition that indicates homosexual relations with a minor.) The ledger entries reveal specific habits, attitudes, values, and characteristics about these men that set them apart—the same traits that identified them as part of a community based on their behavior and relationships. Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines: the forces of authority the laws regarding same-sex sexual behavior the role of the police the role of the magistrates the role of the doctors the common characteristics of the city's male homosexual subculture the sexual behaviors of the Paris underground the geography of the subculture and takes an expanded look at three case studies: “A Decadent Aristocrat and A Delinquent Boy” “Pederasts, Prostitutes, and Pickpockets” “Love and Death in Gay Paris” Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris also includes tables, appendices, and maps linked to statistical data. The book is an essential resource for historians, sociologists, sexologists, criminologists, and other scholars working in the fields of gay and lesbian studies, urban studies, social and cultural history, and French history.

In Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, award-winning author Graham Robb explores the story – and history – of male and female homosexuality in the UK and US, uncovering elements from legislature, literature, medicine and day-to-day life that point to a particularly self-aware and sophisticated culture of Victorian homosexuality. Drawing on famous cases such as the Wilde trials, as well as a wide variety of previously neglected sources, Robb recreates this era with great insight, humour and aplomb, exploding modern myths and restoring the real and vibrant truth of homosexual love to today’s readers: Strangers tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising – a story of oppression and secrecy, but also of unexpected tolerance and familiarity.

The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.