The status of gay and lesbian literature - for centuries considered marginal at best and corrupting at worst - has changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. Gay and lesbian programs now flourish in universities around the world, and the body of gay and lesbian writing continues to grow and to enter the mainstream. At no time has there been a greater need for a focused and insightful guide to the remarkable range of literature and its authors.
The revised edition of The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage is a reader's companion to this impressive body of work. It provides overviews of gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literatures and historical periods; in-depth critical essays on major gay and lesbian authors in world literature; and briefer treatments of other topics and figures important in appreciating the rich and varied gay and lesbian literary traditions. Included are nearly 400 alphabetically arranged articles by more than 175 scholars from around the world.

This new book significantly contributes to an increased understanding of the gay and lesbian experience as it illuminates important works of literature and clarifies the status of same-sex desire in English literature from 1500--1760. Homosexual themes can be found throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Enlightenment, but only rarely are they direct and unambiguous. The essays here are engaged in a vital and necessary process of re-historicizing and re-contextualizing literature. Utilizing a variety of critical methods and proceeding from several different theoretical and ideological presuppositions, these essays raise important questions about the methodology of gay studies, about the conception of same-sex desire, about the depiction of homoerotics, and about the relationship of sexuality and textuality, even as they shed new light on the homosexual import of a number of significant works of literature. Among the authors studied are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, John Cleland, and Thomas Gray.The collection attests both the current intellectual ferment in gay studies and the richness of English Renaissance and eighteenth-century literary representations of homosexuality. Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England provides numerous insights into important works of literature and into significant theoretical issues implicit in the process of discerning and defining homosexuality in texts of earlier ages. All the contributors locate their texts in carefully delineated cultural and historical milieux. But they are not unduly constrained by either the tyranny of theory or the anxieties of anachronism. Rather than proceeding from hidebound or fashionably current ideologies, they sift the texts they study for the concrete evidence from which theories of sexuality might be constructed or modified. Hence, the collection will be valuable both for its practical criticism and for its theoretical contributions. It vividly illustrates the variety of gay studies in literature, especially as applied to works of earlier ages.

The revised edition of The Gay and Lesbian LiteraryHeritage is a reader's companion to this impressive body of work. It provides overviews of gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literatures and historical periods; in-depth critical essays on major gay and lesbian authors in world literature; and briefer treatments of other topics and figures important in appreciating the rich and varied gay and lesbian literary traditions. Included are nearly 400 alphabetically arranged articles by more than 175 scholars from around the world. New articles in this volume feature authors such as Michael Cunningham, Tony Kushner, Anne Lister, Kate Millet, Jan Morris, Terrence McNally, and Sarah Waters; essays on topics such as Comedy of Manners and Autobiography; and overviews of Danish, Norwegian, Philippines, and Swedish literatures; as well as updated and revised articles and bibliographies.

Written by various experts in the field, this volume of thirteen original essays explores some of the most significant theoretical and practical fault lines and controversies in seventeenth-century English literature. The turn into the twenty-first century is an appropriate time to take stock of the state of the field, and, as part of that stock-taking, the need arises to assess both where literary study of the early modern period has been and where it might desirably go. Hence, many of the essays in this collection look both backward and forward. They chart the changes in the field over the past half century, while also looking forward to more change in the future. Some of the essays collected here explore the points of friction, vulnerability, and division that have emerged in literary study of all periods at the end of the twentieth century, such as theory, gender, sexuality, race, and religion. Others are more narrowly focused on fault lines and controversies peculiar to the study of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature. At the same time nearly all of these essays examine and illuminate particular works of literature. They engage theory, but they also illustrate their points concretely by enacting practical criticism of works by authors ranging from Bacon to Milton. What emerges from the collection is a sense of the field's dynamism and vitality. The dominant mood of the essays is a cautious optimism, and, while the contributors are by no means complacent, they all share a belief that the fault lines that have emerged in the field are variously and valuably instructive. By exposing these fault lines the essayists seek a means of acknowledging differences and disagreements without covering them up. They also constructively suggest ways of addressing the issues as a prerequisite to bridging them. By broaching some of the most significant questions that animate the study of early modern literature at the turn into a new century, this volume will be of great value to any student or scholar of seventeenth-century literature.

As the twelve original essays collected in this volume demonstrate, to study the wit of seventeenth-century poetry is necessarily to address concerns at the very heart of the period's shifting literary culture. It is a topic that raises persistent questions of thematics and authorial intent, even as it interrogates a wide spectrum of cultural practices. These essays by some of the most renowned scholars in seventeenth-century studies illuminate important authors and engage issues of politics and religion, of secular and sacred love, of literary theory and poetic technique, of gender relations and historical consciousness, of literary history and social change, as well as larger concerns of literary production and smaller ones of local effects. Collectively, they illustrate the vitality of the topic, both in its own right and as a means of understanding the complexity and range of seventeenth-century English poetry.

The English civil wars loom large in seventeenth-century history and literature. This period, which culminated in the execution of a king, the dismantling of the Established Church, the inauguration of a commonwealth, and the assumption of rule by a lord protector, was one of profound change and disequilibrium. Focusing on writers as major as Milton, Marvell, Herrick, and Vaughan, and as misunderstood as Fane, Overton, and the poet Eliza, the fifteen essays in this collection discuss not only the representation of the civil wars but also the ways in which the civil wars were anticipated, refigured, and refracted in the century's literary imagination.

Although all of the essays are historically grounded and critically based, they vary widely in their historical perspectives and critical techniques, as well as in their scope and area of concentration. Six of the essays are on Royalist literary figures, six are on figures traditionally associated with the Parliamentarian side of the civil wars, two consider both, and the remaining essay examines how Royalist writers refashioned a puritan literary trope.

Unified through the contributors' concentration on "moderate" voices and their recurrent concerns with the ambiguities of literary response, "The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination" provides an important understanding of the English civil wars' manifold and sometimes indirect presence in the literature of the period.