Narratives of Queer Desire Deserts of the Heart [Hardcover]

An interdisciplinary project that uses literary analysis, along with personal testimony and the applications of gender theory, as a means for identifying and exploring LGBTQ stories, the book considers queer yearnings for stories other than those conventionally available, that engage and resist norms in literature as well as culture and politics.List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Writing Sexuality: Lesbian Novels and the Progress Narrative Love in the Shadows: The Same-Sex Marriage Debate and Beyond Reading for Fantasy in 'Rip Van Winkle' and The Farewell Symphony Remaking Gender Systems of Story: Sexual Violence in Bastard Out of Carolina and The Way the Crow Flies Trussed/Trust/Dressed in Translation Notes Bibliography Index

Examining texts as various as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart, Ann Bannon's Women in the Shadows, Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Pedro Almod?var's All About My Mother, Margaret Breen brings to the fore topics as diverse but interrelated as queer agency, same-sex marriage, identity categories, fantasy and gender melancholy, sexual abuse, and translation. Most profoundly, Narratives of Queer Desire eloquently illustrates the power of art to make visible those who are too often erased by heteronormative culture. Breen's book witnesses to the power of literature to engage queer experience and challenge oppression.

- Claude Summers, General Editor, glbtq.com

'Breen (Univ. of Connecticut) accomplishes quite a bit in this relatively brief book. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to answering questions about how reading and writing literature help one engage in social-justice issues...these analyses about the power of storytelling read well alongside contemporary theory, e.g., Judith Butler's Undoing Gender (2004) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's pló-