Description
Book SynopsisThe stories gathered here explore the vagaries of sexual desire, gender identity, and erotic attachment, revealing the surprising queerness of nineteenth-century American literature.
Trade Review"A marvelously heterodox collection of American shorter fiction from the long nineteenth century." *
Times Literary Supplement *
"Looby's contribution is nothing short of game-changing . . . [A] scintillating collection of short stories . . . It is hard not to marvel at the range of queer stories Looby has collected here. Almost all somehow trouble the nineteenth century's foundational ideas about gender and domesticity." *
GLQ *
"Looby’s anthology brings together several stunning narrative experiments that challenge any normative description of nineteenth-century literary aesthetics. It is a treasure to have at one’s fingertips so many piercing exceptions to the patriarchal metanarratives of American literary production...It challenges the reader to confront historical desire in all its alterity, nonconformity, and violent intensity. Queer readers may come to these stories looking for our predecessors, but we instead find something as hard and uncanny as human bone." * ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 *
