This collection of essays brings together scholars from a wide range of critical approaches to study T. S. Eliot's engagement with desire, homoeroticism and early twentieth-century feminism in his poetry, prose and drama. Ranging from historical and formalist literary criticism to psychological and psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, Gender, Desire and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot illuminates such topics as the influence of Eliot's mother - a poet and social reformer - on his art; the aesthetic function of physical desire; the dynamic of homosexuality in his poetry and prose; and his identification with passive or 'feminine' desire in his poetry and drama. The book also charts his reception by female critics from the early twentieth century to the present. This book should be essential reading for students of Eliot and Modernism, as well as queer theory and gender studies.

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A2 (highly excellent), University of Edinburgh (Department of English Literature), course: Modernism, language: English, abstract: The rise of feminist theory during the last decades provoked a reconsideration of the general focus of interpreting literary texts, and literary criticism has been largely engaged in a rereading of canonical author’s works in terms of gender and sexuality while many definitions underwent a necessary revision. Modernist works, especially poetry, are a rewarding source for an interpretation in these terms since due to their fragmentary, ambivalent nature and lack of thematic clarity they offer much room for different interpretations. With its predominating sexuality, Freudian psychoanalysis and questions of sex and gender sneaked into the modernist world. In this essay I will attempt a reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in order to see in how far such issues are implied. 1 My understanding of ‘gender’ follows that of Judith Butler, who pointed out that gender is not only socially constructed in discourse rather than biologically predetermined, but also performative. 2 This is quite evident in Eliot’s poem. Moreover, in modernist texts sexuality seems to lose romance and meaning. In Eliot’s case such a loss seems connected with personal experience. His marriage with Vivien Haigh-Wood was problematic from the beginning on and worsened increasingly, and while working on The Waste Land he had a nervous breakdown. The poem is divided into five parts and features various narrative voices which cannot always be identified unmistakably, especially in terms of the speaker’s gender. In order to examine the depiction of gender and sexuality in the poem, I will proceed mostly chronologically and focus on the depiction of the love relationships. Due to the limited scope of this paper I cannot, by far, include all relevant themes, let alone the numerous other related fragments and themes. The focus is therefore on the hyacinth girl, the Fisher King and Phlebas / Eugenides, the couple and Lil and Philomel, as well as Tiresias and the typist. Images of fertility and homoerotic desire will be considered alongside the character depictions. [...]

Here, one of the world's pioneers in the field of masculinity studies explores the construction of male sexuality, pornography, and sexual violence. Michael S. Kimmel analyzes what male sexuality is, where it comes from, how it works, what affects it, pornography's impact on it, what fantasies men have about sex, what people think about sex, and how male ideas about sex affect what men actually do. Provocative and wide-ranging, these essays make important contributions to sociology, queer theory, American studies, history, and studies of gender, sexuality, and gay and lesbian issues.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

Some facets of these plays explored in this study include the asymmetry of gender; the representation of gender as natural and universal or as discursively constructed; the reinforcement or subversion of traditional gender traits, gender principles, and gender structures; and the relationship of sex, gender, and sexuality, terms too often conflated in postmodern and early modern parlance.

This collection offers students and scholars of Eliot’s work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, reflecting the latest developments in literary criticism. It features innovative analysis ­exploring the relation between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual sensibilities and those of our own era. A comprehensive collection of essays written by leading Eliot scholars Offers a contemporary reappraisals of Eliot’s work reflecting a broad range of current academic interests, including religion, science, ethics, politics, and aesthetics Reflects the very latest developments in literary scholarship Traces the revealing links between Eliot’s Victorian intellectual ­concerns and those of today

Saunders explores the dialectic of desire, re-evaluating both Donne's poetry and the complex responses it has inspired. This study takes into account recent developments in the fields of historicism, feminism, queer theory, and postmodern psychoanalysis, while offering dazzling close readings of many of Donne's most famous poems.