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摘要
摘要
While many books have been written about gay writing, this is an account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
Woods's (Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry) dense but rewarding history has a lofty aim: "queering the canon." Starting with the man-boy love of Greek classics, this academic text focuses on homoeroticism in the literary imagination. But Woods does more. By analyzing attitudes about homosexual men, he looks at the homophobic ideologies that poetry and prose have encouraged throughout history. While there is not enough information on the role of religion in classifying sodomy as sin, Woods demonstrates that as early as the 12th century, hostility against man-to-man love was evident. But despite the linking of homosexual love with shame and repentance, it formed a culturedescribed by writers as diverse as Aristophanes, Rumi, William Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes and Jane Austenthat held on. Woods's commentary about the Nazis and about the popular postwar belief that fascism developed because of Germany's tolerance of "sexual perversion" is eye-opening, as is his deconstruction of 1950s crime fiction, which routinely depicted gay men as deviants. Woods moves his readers into the decades since Stonewall and scrutinizes writing that deals with gay pride as well as AIDS. Throughout, his point that homoerotic traditions are a literary constant is well-taken and persuasively argued. Woods makes inroads in defining queer culture and illuminates the essential role gay men have played in the Western canon. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
These finely honed gay readings of selected Western (and some Eastern) literary texts richly reward the careful attention they demand. Woods (Gay & Lesbian Studies/Nottingham Trent Univ., England) extracts the full interpretive mileage to be had from ideals of ambiguity, paradox, and perspective. This is already evident in the structure of the book, which approaches its subject from diverse angles, both chronological and thematic. Separate chapters address, among other topics, the Greek classics, the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, Proust, the Holocaust, women writers, masturbation, boyhood, and the political left. That such a far-ranging gay-themed book is possible at all owes to an ambiguity in the notion of gay reading: A text's status as gay may depend either on the sexual identity of its author or on its susceptibility to placement in interpretive contexts of homosexual attraction. Thus, while the very idea of a canon of gay writing depends on a tradition of gay authorship, a gay reading of Shakespeare's ""fiendishly ambiguous"" Sonnet 20 stands apart from the (contested) sexual identity of its writer. Woods acknowledges and affirms this tension by publishing his book with a major university press, while implying by his frequent intimate use of the selectively embracing, ""us"" that most, if not all of his readers are surely gay. The final brilliant chapter, ""Poetry and Paradox,"" weds the social subversions of paradox typical of all minority groups (compare, from a Jewish perspective, Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing) to the heights of poetic art. Woods's own artistry is evident throughout this elegant and startling book, especially in the memorable turns of phrase (e.g., in the chapter ""The Family and Its Alternatives': ""Outlaws and inlaws are simply not compatible""). Though grounded in the particulars of gay male identity, this masterpiece of literary (and social) criticism calls across the divides of sex and sexual orientation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice 评论
Woods is a smart writer, but this is not a smart book. Woods's sparkling insights provide reading pleasure all too rare in contemporary academic writing--a pleasure like that derived from reading Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader. But unlike Woolf, Woods or his editor did not have the sense to let individual essays, many of them brief and impressionistic, stand on their own merits. The chronological order fails as a persuasive revelation of "tradition," and the volume lacks an organizing thesis. An introduction attempts to ground the notion of a homoerotic "tradition" (left undefined) in competing theoretical contexts, but Woods goes on to assume more or less universal homoerotic impulses and more or less universal homophobic reactions, which gay writers more or less universally subvert. Since Woods includes some very obscure works that are beyond the scope of introductory studies, and since his nonchalance about thesis and chronology diminishes the value of his insights for the expert, this reviewer wonders whom Woods imagines his book serves. Western literature needs both a complement to Robert K. Martin's The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (CH, May'80; exp. ed., 1998) and a popular book for lay readers, but this is neither. Still, one finds here wonderful bits and pieces. Recommended with reservations. D. N. Mager; Johnson C. Smith University