Keele Research Repository
Explore the Repository
Janes, D (2016) Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, ? - ? (288). ISBN 9780226396552
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
"I do not say you are it, but you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad," Lord Queensbury challenged Oscar Wilde in the courtroom which erupted in laughter accusing Wilde of posing as a sodomite. What was so terrible about posing as a sodomite, and why was Queensbury's horror greeted with such amusement? In Oscar Wilde Prefigured, Dominic Janes suggests that what divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite, but whether or not it mattered that people could appear to be sodomites. For many, intimations of sodomy were simply a part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life.Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this "queer moment" in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain.
Item Type: | Book |
---|---|
Uncontrolled Keywords: | homosexuality, history, Great Britain, art, gay men in art, caricature |
Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman > HQ75 Homosexuality. Lesbianism |
Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Humanities |
Depositing User: | Symplectic |
Date Deposited: | 19 Jan 2017 09:46 |
Last Modified: | 19 Jan 2017 09:49 |
URI: | https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/2801 |