Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Between Men, Tendencies, A Dialogue on Love, and Touching Feeling.

"Close readings of Melville's Billy Budd, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and of Proust, Nietzsche, Henry James, and Thackeray bristle with keen observations relating entrenched fears of same-sex relationships to contemporary gay-bashing."

• Acknowledgments Credits Preface to the 2008 Edition Introduction: Axiomatic I. Epistemology of the Closet 2. Some Binarisms (I)Billy Budd: After the Homosexual 3· Some Binarisms (II)Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relationsof the Male Body 4· The Beast in the ClosetJames and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 5· Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet Index

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Between Men, Tendencies, A Dialogue on Love, and Touching Feeling.

"Close readings of Melville's Billy Budd, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and of Proust, Nietzsche, Henry James, and Thackeray bristle with keen observations relating entrenched fears of same-sex relationships to contemporary gay-bashing."

• Acknowledgments Credits Preface to the 2008 Edition Introduction: Axiomatic I. Epistemology of the Closet 2. Some Binarisms (I)Billy Budd: After the Homosexual 3· Some Binarisms (II)Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relationsof the Male Body 4· The Beast in the ClosetJames and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 5· Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet Index