This moving novel teases us with the question of what Dickens' Pip might have been like if he had grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues that galvanized the world in those decades: racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and surprises. Furnace Creek effortlessly combines elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery plot. Written with a natural storyteller's gift of imagination, it leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to capture the emotional intensity of characters whose lives will haunt the reader beyond the page.

This study argues that modern fiction, from Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism. Challenging overarching theories of the novel by mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Joseph Allen Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. A study of the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, this text is a survey of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.