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A rich heritage that needs to be documented
Beginning in 1869, when the study of homosexuality can be said to have begun with the establishment of sexology, this encyclopedia offers accounts of the most important international developments in an area that now occupies a critical place in many fields of academic endeavors. It covers a long history and a dynamic and ever changing present, while opening up the academic profession to new scholarship and new ways of thinking.
A groundbreaking new approach
While gays and lesbians have shared many aspects of life, their histories and cultures developed in profoundly different ways. To reflect this crucial fact, the encyclopedia has been prepared in two separate volumes assuring that both histories receive full, unbiased attention and that a broad range of human experience is covered.
Written for and by a wide range of people
Intended as a reference for students and scholars in all fields, as well as for the general public, the encyclopedia is written in user-friendly language. At the same time it maintains a high level of scholarship that incorporates both passion and objectivity. It is written by some of the most famous names in the field, as well as new scholars, whose research continues to advance gender studies into the future.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Because gothic fiction was the one semi-respectable genre that regularly explored sexual and social transgressions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, George E. Haggerty's Queer Gothic argues that it makes sense to consider the ways in which gothic fiction itself helped to shape thinking about sexual matters, create the darker shadows of the dominant fiction, and jump-start the age of sexology. Haggerty examines a variety of issues, including the ways in which gothic fiction centers on loss as the foreclosure of homoerotic possibility, the uses to which same-sex desire can be put in a patriarchal culture, and the relationship between transgressive sexual behaviors and a range of religious behaviors understood as "Catholic." Other chapters consider the erotic implications of gothic millenialism and move beyond the eighteenth century to discuss gothic fiction in the 1890s and 1990s, including Henry James's The Ambassadors, Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Reflections on Sentiment not only addresses current scholarly interest in feeling and affect but also provides an occasion to celebrate the career of George Starr, who, in more than fifty years of incisive scholarship and committed teaching, haselucidated the work of Daniel Defoe and the role of sentimentalism in what was once reductively termed an age of reason and realism. Due to the critique Starr spearheaded, scholars today can approach with greater assurance the complex interplay of reason and emotion, thought and sensibility, science and feeling, rationality and enthusiasm, judgment and wit, as well as forethought and instinct, as these shaped the scientific, religious, political, social, literary, and cultural revolutions of the Enlightenment. Indeed, contributors to this anthology take inspiration from Starr's work to shed new light on Enlightenment thought and sociocultural formations generally, offering fresh interpretations of a period in which Reflection and Sentiment circulated, mutually influenced each other, and contended equally for cultural attention. In nine separate essays they explore: the ways sentiment and sentimentalism inflect the moral and ideological ambit of Enlightenment discourses; the sociopolitics of religious debate; the issues promoted by women writers, by gender and family relations; the artistic and rhetorical uses of lived language; the impacts of cultural developments on novelistic form; and the wide shifts in the literary marketplace. Deploying tools advanced by new work in animal studies, gender criticism, media analysis, genre studies, the new formalism, and ethical inquiry, and enabled by the power of digitization and new databases, the authors of this volume explain how and to what ends denizens of the Enlightenment were touched and moved.

Love in all its cultural and personal complexity is the focus of this book. While scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homoerotic culture have tended to focus on sexual behavior and the much-maligned figure of the sodomite, George E. Haggerty argues that the concepts of love and emotional intimacy offer a more useful perspective for understanding male-male relations of the time.

Haggerty considers male "identities" of many kinds: heroic friends, as found in seventeenth-century French romance and Restoration tragedy, and personal friends, as in the erotic relationships of Gray, Walpole, and West; fops and beaus, as depicted in Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedy and various satirical portraits; effeminate sodomites and mollies depicted in literature and sodomy trial accounts throughout the period; men of feeling and other figures in whom sensibility and sexuality are vividly interconnected. He also discusses libertines and sexual aggressors, especially as depicted in the pages of Gothic fiction.