Description
Book SynopsisA reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory. Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its art for art's sake rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being queer can be an advantage not in spite but because of social hostility toward nonnormative desires. Showing how aesthetesamong them Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Fieldharnessed the force that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the negative, Friedman reveals how becoming self-a
Trade ReviewFriedman meticulously delineates a queer aestheticist tradition distinct from earlier queer theory and anticipates what may become the aesthetic turn of queer theory.
—Tara Thomas,
Papers on Language and LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Homoerotic Subjectivity in Walter Pater's Early Essays
2. Styles of Survival in Pater's Later Writings
3. Oscar Wilde's Lyric Performativity
4. Vernon Lee and the Specter of Lesbian History
5. Queering Indifference in Michael Field's Ekphrastic Poetry
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
