Description
Book SynopsisAs Germany-and German-speaking Europe-became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality.
Trade Review"Tobin's brilliantly argued, beautifully written and highly erudite study provides clear and nuanced answers to the question of why sexology should have arisen when and where it did." *
Times Literary Supplement *
"This is a major contribution to both gay and German studies. Tobin's work is exemplary." * Sander Gilman, Emory University *
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Peripheral Desires will set a new standard for the kind of cultural studies that the history of sexuality has always needed. Readers of this book will be newly edified in areas which they already thought they knew." * George E. Haggerty, University of California, Riverside *
Table of ContentsPreface. Peripheral Desires
Introduction. 1869—Urnings, Homosexuals, and Inverts
Chapter 1. Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts
Chapter 2. The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation
Chapter 3. Jews and Homosexuals
Chapter 4. "Homosexuality" and the Politics of the Nation in Austria, Hungary, and Austria-Hungary
Chapter 5. Colonialism and Sexuality: German Perspectives on Samoa
Chapter 6. Swiss Universities: The Emancipated Woman and the Third Sex
Chapter 7. Thomas Mann's Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice
Chapter 8. Pederasty in Palestine: Sexuality and Nationality in Arnold Zweig's De Vriendt kehrt heim
Conclusion. American Legacies of the German Discovery of Sex
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
