Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885

This text examines how and why effeminacy and empire were so very much at odds at the time of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895. Exploring the late-Victorian association of effeminate behaviour with male homosexual identity, Joseph Bristow looks at how a number of gay writers negotiated the stigma attached to the man-loving man of letters. Chapters examine, in turn, Wilde's "fatal effeminacy", the effeminophobic narratives of E.M. Forster, the Anglophobic camp effeminacy of Ronald Firbank and the structures of sexual self-identification in the autobiographical writings of John Addington Symonds, J.R. Ackerley, Jocelyn Brooke and Quentin Crisp. A short coda investigates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on this tradition of gay men's writing, discussing in particular Alan Hollinghurst's novel, "The Swimming-Pool Library".