Libidinal currents : sexuality and the shaping of modernism / Joseph Allen Boone.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boone, Joseph Allen.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Literature, Modern--19th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

xii, 513 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Summary:

From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism.

Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.

"Not only a consummate close reader but also a systematic and visionary thinker, Joseph Boone has produced a brilliant study of the libidinal politics of modernism". -- Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan

Contents:

Introduction: Modernity's Fictions of Sexuality: Definitions / Parameters / Desires 1

1 Policing and Depolicing the Theory of the Novel: Repression, Transgression, and the Erotics of "Heretic Narrative" in "Victorian" Fiction 32

Villette / Charlotte Bronte 33

2 Channeling the Floods of Desire: Women, Water, and the Plot of Sexual Awakening in Turn-of-the-Century Narrative 62

The Awakening: Swimming into the Unknown / Kate Chopin 73

The Virgin and the Gipsy: "Listen for the Voice of the Water" / D. H. Lawrence 93

Dora: (Freud's) Wet Dreams / Sigmund Freud 115

3 Modernist Theaters of the Mind I: Staging Sexuality in the Flux of Consciousness 142

Ulysses: (Re)Staging Sexuality in "Circe", Performing (as) "Penelope" / James Joyce 151

Mrs. Dalloway: Representing "the Unseen Part of Us, Which Spreads Wide" / Virginia Woolf 172

4 Theaters of the Mind II: Queer Sites in Modernism: Harlem / The Left Bank / Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s 204

"Smoke, Lilies, and Jade": Harlem as a Homo State of Mind / Bruce Nugent 220

Nightwood: Worlds of Night in the City of Light / Djuna Barnes 232

The Young and Evil: A Walk on the Wild Side / Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler 251

Strange Brother: Strange Passages / Blair Niles 265

5 Under the Shadow of Fascism: Oedipus, Sexual Anxiety, and the Deauthorizing Designs of Paternal Narrative 288

Absalom, Absalom!: Creation by the Father's Fiat / William Faulkner 298

The Man Who Loved Children: At the Crossroads of Myth and Psychoanalysis / Christina Stead 323

6 Fragmented Selves, Mythic Descents, and Third World Geographies: Fifties' Writing Gone Mad 352

Alexandria Quartet: Homoerotic Negotiations in Colonial Narrative / Lawrence Durrell 364

The Golden Notebook: Sex-Race Wars on the Frontier / Doris Lessing 389.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 425-495) and index.

ISBN:

0226064662

0226064670

OCLC:

37369153