The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this volume of essays investigate the question: what do literary scholars contribute to social scientific research on human happiness and flourishing? Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the contributors reflect on how their literary research-work to which they are personally committed-might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The contributors' areas of research are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable, but by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

"Feeling Backward" weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.

"Feeling Backward" makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.

Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, "Feeling Backward" argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.

The sociology of "social deviants" flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the next decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses-challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but the nature of society itself. With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the anti-normative, anti-essentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work-both published and unpublished-that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work-both published and unpublished-that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.

The sociology of "social deviants" flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the next decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses-challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but the nature of society itself. With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the anti-normative, anti-essentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.