Peripheral desires : the German discovery of sex / Robert Deam Tobin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tobin, Robert Deam, author.

Series:

Haney Foundation series.

Haney Foundation Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German literature--19th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

German literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Homosexuality in literature.

Homosexuality and literature.

Homosexuality--Germany--History--19th century.

Homosexuality.

Homosexuality--Germany--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (328 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830's through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe-and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna. In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient. As 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface. 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: Emancipated Women 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

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780812291865

0812291867

OCLC:

921007971