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.

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

"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.""--

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.

A detailed up-to-date survey of the most important woman writer from Greco-Roman antiquity. Examines the nature and context of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan.

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the expansion of the city in the nineteenth century, to its unique appeal to artists and writers in the twentieth, New York has given its writers a unique perspective on American culture. This Companion explores the range of writing and performance in the city, celebrating Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Eugene O'Neill, and Allen Ginsberg among a host of authors who have contributed to the city's rich literary and cultural history. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is the ideal guide for students of American literature as well as for all who love New York and its writers.