The Modernist Art of Queer Survival

Hannah Roche, Modern Language Review The Modernist Art of Queer Survival is an invigorating book, and one that will endure. Queer theory has a future, and this is the kind of work that makes scholars want to be a part of it.

The Year's Work in English Studies Bringing foundational perspectives on queer theory to bear on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, Bateman delivers a monograph that is equally informed by the historical and the theoretical, the aesthetic and the philosophical. It is a work of depth and insight, and a profound contribution not only to modernist studies, but also to forms of queer theory that could reap substantial rewards from the kind of modernist literary perspective through which Bateman stages the terms of his argument.

Joseph Boone, University of Southern California, Los Angeles An astute contribution to queer, modernist, and eco-criticism, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival offers a powerful alternative to the tendency in much queer theory to disclaim futurity. Through readings of James, Wilde, Forster,and Cather, Benjamin Bateman mounts a convincing counter-argument for 'queer survival' as future possibility:an embracing of the disruptions of self that occur upon inviting the unexpected to enter and become part of oneself. It is here in the kind of future Bateman proposes, where the concept of queer survival can expose the elastic contours of life and dissolve the boundaries between the animate and inanimate.

Brian Glavey, University of South Carolina Bringing impressive nuance to queer debates about temporality, which sometimes seem to insist in overly stark terms that queerness exists only in an unrealized future or in no future at all, Benjamin Bateman helps us recognize the dignity and creativity involved in the quotidian work of hanging on and letting go that constitutes queer survival. In a series of brilliant readings of modernist texts, his study disentangles survival from normative ideologies of success and sovereignty, demonstrating the ways that Oscar Wilde, Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather ask us to rethink survival in terms of weakness, frangibility, and porousness. The result is a work of remarkable intelligence and ethical urgency, a vibrant resource not only for students of modernism and queer studies but for all of us trying to improvise our way into an uncertain future.

A. J. Barlow, CHOICE Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Benjamin Bateman teaches modern and contemporary literature and gender and sexuality studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

Series Editor Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Henry James's Animal Encounters Chapter 2: Oscar Wilde's Messy Messianism Chapter 3: Forster's Queer Invitation Chapter 4: The Invitation's Success Chapter 5: Cather's Survival By Suicide Coda