The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

Benjamin Kahan is the Robert Penn Warren Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the University of Sydney, the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, and Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (2019).

'If there were an adjective twice as big as gargantuan, that would be the word to describe The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, a magisterial collection that verges toward nine hundred pages and contains more than fifty authors. That may seem hyperbolic, but to this reader it feels more like understatement when faced with reviewing this book's achievements. Highlighting methods, contents, practices, and narratives, editor Benjamin Kahan has accomplished a major feat through bringing together this wide-ranging collection of writers, critics, and academics who explore the multipronged intersections and causeways of queerness and American literature. Because this work underlines the centrality of queerness to the past, present, and future of American literary studies, it raises ambitious possibilities. Indeed, the most exciting aspect of this book is that it showcases how often the most absorbing work in literary analysis dovetails with queer studies: queer is both animus and principle that propels some of the most captivating research in literature to date. As such, this volume has the capacity to reshape the trajectory of multiple fields of study in the ensuing years and offers crucial reading material for all research libraries. In this manner, it is impressive to read what has been the result of thousands of hours in this veritable Who's Who of queer studies in the contemporary academy.' Ben Bascom, American Literary History

• Introduction; Part I. Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality; The Sexuality of American History: 1. Transatlantic origin stories: the transmasculinity narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic eighteenth century; 2. Queering the founding; or, the revolution of sex; 3. Whither the queer history of slavery?; 4. Queering immigration and the social body, 1875–1924; 5. The queerness of WWII: problems and possibilities; 6. Queer bonds of Cold War sexuality; 7. 'The Dead Never Die': pre-exposure prophylaxis, queer temporalities, and the literature of AIDS; 8. Fiction in the post-Lawrence v. Texas era, or inventing heteronormative queerness; Queer Literary Movements: 9.Trans-ing transcendentalism; 10. Sentimental literature and the erotics of identification; 11. Queer modernism and misfit identity; 12. Imperialism and the queer Harlem renaissance; 13. The mystical sexuality of the beats and the Berkeley renaissance; 14. The New York school's queer happiness; 15. Chicana and Latina lesbian feminists and the radical making of anthological archives of willfulness; 16. Queer literature after queer theory; Part II: Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality; Queer Genre: 17. Queer historical poetics and queer formalism: American poetry before 1850; 18. Queer mythology in American poetry, 1855–1913; 19. Funny emotions: queer lyric from the new verse to the New American poets; 20. Queer American poetry now; 21. Queer American drama: plays, replays, yet-to-be-plays; 22. The gay genre: musical theatre from Showboat to A Strange Loop; 23. The oneiric golden age of gay and lesbian pulp fiction; 24. Queering desire in American science fiction; 25. Queering comics histories; 26. LGBT bestsellers; 27. History touches us everywhere: American queer and trans memoir in the long twentieth century; Race and the Politics of Queer and Trans Representation: 28. Whiteness and trans genre, whiteness as trans genre; 29. Queer types for early Asian American literature; 30. The queerness of Blackness; 31. Two-spirit writers and the sovereign erotic in queer Native American literature; 32. The insubordination of Latina literature; Space and the Regional Imaginary of Queer Literature: 33. Queer southern literature and the dirty South; 34. Queer diaspoRican circuits; 35.'where sadness makes sense': the queer poetics of the midwest terrain; 36. Queer New England regionalism; 37. Queer beginnings at the end of the frontier: Asia and the Pacific in the making of a modern gay American identity; 38. Queer American literature in the world; Part III: Queer Methods; How to Recognize the Queer Past Before (and During) the Advent of Medicalization: 39. Repression, sublimation, and latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy; 40. Gender variance before trans: a literary history; 41. Female friendship: romantic friends and Boston marriages; 42. The medical model and early gay and lesbian writing; 43. 'Flung out of Space': class and sexuality in American literary history; 44. Quantifying sex; 45. The pleasures of reading camp; 46. The queerness of religion; 47. Tracing queer crip poetics in time; 48. Queer print culture: the market and circulation of gay and lesbian literature.