Anchit Sathi - Böcker

This volume offers the first critical examination of how societal pressures compelling individuals towards parenthood are experienced, processed, and enacted by queer characters in selected works by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust—authors now widely regarded as queer, despite not having claimed such an identity in their own time. The selected texts include Mann’s Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow and Death in Venice, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, and key sections from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. By engaging these texts in a pairwise dialogue, this book argues that Mann, Woolf, and Proust employ a shared repertoire of motifs and narrative strategies to depict queer characters’ struggles with the institution of parenthood. However, it contends that each author articulates a distinct and nuanced approach to this theme, shaped in part by the specific cultural contexts in which they wrote. To substantiate this argument, the monograph draws on insights from queer theory, metaphor theory, and the social sciences, predominantly from late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship, thereby reinforcing its commitment to linking literary modernism to contemporary lived realities. At the same time, the analysis situates these works within the broader socio-historical framework of the early twentieth century, which is to say the modernist period, with which these authors are conventionally associated.

This edited collection provides a critical forum for scholars to examine the evolution of queer kinship—encompassing the wide range of relationships, both biological and nonbiological, that queer individuals choose (or are compelled) to establish—through its representation in literature over time and across cultural contexts.

This edited collection provides a critical forum for scholars to examine the evolution of queer kinship—encompassing the wide range of relationships, both biological and nonbiological, that queer individuals choose (or are compelled) to establish—through its representation in literature over time and across cultural contexts. In particular, the ten essays in this collection utilize close readings, philosophy, and theory to address the following question: How can we conceptualize the nature of queer kinship based on its textual representations?To this end, the essays engage with a diverse array of texts, from Buddhist writing to contemporary song lyrics, French literature from the 17th and 18th centuries to contemporary drama and novels from Sweden, Israel, and the Anglosphere. This broad temporal and geographic scope yields new critical insights into the varied ontologies of queer kinship and highlights the inherent paradoxes and fundamental messiness in queer kinship formations across different times, spaces, and contexts. In doing so, the collection makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of kinship studies, queer studies, and comparative literature.