Queer Communism and The Ministry of Love


Book Description

Maps materiality's importance in the emergent posthuman future of architecture.




Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love


Book Description

It is well known that many of the best-known queer writers of the 1930s were involved with leftist politics. Why, then, has there been no extended examination of this striking juncture of dissident sex and socialism? Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love addresses this question, among others, to transform current narratives of midcentury literary, cultural, and intellectual history from a queer Marxist perspective. It provides a unique exploration of the transnational formation of queer leftist writing in 1930s Britain informed by detailed research on Weimar Berlin, Civil War Spain and the Soviet UnioQueer Communism reconstructs queer writers' engagements with a series of wide-ranging Marxist aesthetic debates, social forms and political strategies. Through case studies of Christopher Isherwood and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Salton-Cox argues that queer writing of the 1930s was deeply embedded in a network of transnational leftist formations stretching across Weimar Germany, Soviet Russia, Spain and China. Probing the left's mounting heteronormativity in the late 30s and 40s in chapters on Katharine Burdekin and George Orwell, Queer Communism also traces the genesis of post-war sexual politics in Popular Front antifascism. Salton-Cox's study transforms current narratives of mid-century literary, cultural and intellectual history from a queer Marxist perspective.n.




Love's Next Meeting


Book Description

How queerness and radical politics intersected—earlier than you thought. Well before Stonewall, a broad cross section of sexual dissidents took advantage of their space on the margins of American society to throw themselves into leftist campaigns. Sensitive already to sexual marginalization, they also saw how class inequality was exacerbated by the Great Depression, witnessing the terrible bread lines and bread riots of the era. They participated in radical labor organizing, sympathized like many with the early prewar Soviet Union, contributed to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, opposed US police and state harassment, fought racial discrimination, and aligned themselves with the dispossessed. Whether they were themselves straight, gay, or otherwise queer, they brought sexual dissidence and radicalism into conversation at the height of the Left's influence on American culture. Combining rich archival research with inventive analysis of art and literature, Love’s Next Meeting explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in American culture between 1920 and 1960. Aaron S. Lecklider uncovers a lively cast of individuals and dynamic expressive works, revealing remarkably progressive engagement with homosexuality among radicals, workers, and the poor. Leftists connected sexual dissidence with radical gender politics, antiracism, and challenges to censorship and obscenity laws through the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, a wide array of activists, organizers, artists, and writers laid the foundation for a radical movement through which homosexual lives and experiences were given shape and new political identities were forged. Love's Next Meeting cuts to the heart of some of the biggest questions in American history: questions about socialism, about sexuality, about the supposed clash still making headlines today between leftist politics and identity politics. What emerges is a dramatic, sexually vibrant story of the shared struggles for liberation across the twentieth century.




The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature


Book Description

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.




The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics


Book Description

For a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.




Red Britain


Book Description

Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union. Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.




The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s


Book Description

The 1930s is frequently seen as a unique moment in British literary history, a decade where writing was shaped by an intense series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks. Yet what is contained under the rubric of 1930s writing has been the subject of competing claims, and therefore this Companion offers the reader an incisive survey covering the decade's literature and its status in critical debates. Across the chapters, sustained attention is given to writers of growing scholarly interest, to pivotal authors of the period, such as Auden, Orwell, and Woolf, to the development of key literary forms and themes, and to the relationship between this literature and the decade's pressing social and political contexts. Through this, the reader will gain new insight into 1930s literary history, and an understanding of many of the critical debates that have marked the study of this unique literary era.




Mid-Century Romance


Book Description

Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism. Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.




The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction


Book Description

With austerity biting hard and fascism on the march at home and abroad, the Britain of the 1930s grappled with many problems familiar to us today. Moving beyond the traditional focus on 'the Auden generation', this book surveys the literature of the period in all its diversity, from working class, women, queer and postcolonial writers to popular crime and thriller novels. In this way, the book explores the uneven processes of modernization and cultural democratization that characterized the decade. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, the book covers such writers as Eric Ambler, Mulk Raj Anand, Katharine Burdekin, Agatha Christie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Christopher Isherwood, Storm Jameson, Ethel Mannin, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christina Stead, Evelyn Waugh and many others.




The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four


Book Description

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates, and academics. Situating the novel in multiple frameworks, including contextual considerations and literary histories, the book asks new questions about the novel's significance in an age in which authoritarianism finds itself freshly empowered.