Knowing that queer voices have been making themselves heard in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria decades before Stonewall, editors Gary Schmidt and Merrill Cole curated thrilling snapshots of prose fiction from more than twenty contemporary writers whose work defies stereotypes, disciplines, and expectations. These authors produce fiction for adults and young people that celebrates the multiplicity of the present, casts a queer eye on the past, and interrogates LGBTQ futures. These outstanding texts exemplify the glittering variety of styles, themes, settings, and subjects addressed by openly queer authors who write in German today. They explore identity, sexuality, history, fantasy, loss, and discovery. Their authors, narrators, and characters explore gender nonconformity and living queer everywhere from city centers to rural communities. They are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and nonbinary. They are exiles, immigrants, and travelers through time and space. Witty, titillating, and a delight to read, Quertext opens up new worlds of experience for readers interested in queer life beyond the Anglophone world. Featuring work by JUErgen Bauer * Ella Blix * Claudia Breitsprecher * Lovis Cassaris * Gunther Geltinger * Joachim Helfer * Odile Kennel * Friedrich KrOEhnke * Anja KUEmmel * Marko Martin * Hans Pleschinski * Christoph Poschenrieder * Peter Rehberg * Michael Roes * Sasha Marianna Salzmann * Angela Steidele * Antje RAvik Strubel * Alain Claude Sulzer * Antje Wagner * J. Walther * Tania Witte * Yusuf YesilOEz

This book posits that male homoeroticism is a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of modernism and the crisis of modern masculine identity. Cole explores how homoerotic affect - instantiated in the works of Rimbaud, Crane and Eliot - contributes to queer theory, and shows what poetry has to offer critical inquiry. This book aims to re-establish an interest in poetry by integrating question of prosody and aesthetics with political literary study. Cole used the methodological insights of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and Marxism to elaborate the social significance of poetic experiment, and reinvigorate the concepts of affect and imagination, while arguing against antiformalist approaches to literature.

First published in 2003. This volume aims to re-establish an interest in poetry by integrating questions of prosody and aesthetics with political literary inquiry. The broader theoretical goal is nothing less than a rehabilitation of the concepts of affect and imagination, though the study also argues against anti-formalist approaches to literature.