From experiments in language and identity to innovations in the novel, the short story and life narratives, the contributors discuss the ways in which Bowen's work straddles, informs and defies the existing definitions of modernist and postmodernist literature which dominate twentieth-century writing. The eleven chapters present new scholarship on Bowen's inventiveness and unique writing style and its attachment to objects, covering topics such as queer adolescents, housekeeping, female fetishism, habit and new technologies such as the telephone.

This new volume of essays examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality. Why did so many literary Modernists embrace Catholicism? What is their relationship between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Britain to America and France, "Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives" interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality. The result is a radical revision of the sacred - in life and art, the body and devotion.

As the 1960s recede further into our collective memory, curiosity and nostalgia for this groovy, flower-powered decade persists. Many books have charted the social history of this tumultuous time, but none have provided queer readings of the icons and iconoclasts that peopled its stage. The Queer Sixties assembles an impressive group of cultural critics to go against the grain of 1960s studies, and proposes new and different ways of looking at the queer cultural and subcultural expression of the last decade before the closet doors swung open. A magical mystery tour, this collection reveals the queer in the Beatles and Jim Morrison, unearths the cultural power of lesbian and gay pulp fiction, and reads the queer in Myra Breckinridge, In Cold Blood, and Another Country, among others. Imbued with the zeitgeist of the 60s, this playful and powerful collection rescues the persistence of the queer imaginary.

Explores Elizabeth Bowen's significant contribution to twentieth-century literary theory Provides new avenues for research in Bowen studies in ways that are concerned primarily with Bowen's perception of writing and narrative Moves away from perceptions of Bowen's writing tied to existing ideological categories, such as viewing her work through a lens of psychoanalysis, modernism, or Irish or British history and which emphasise Bowen's innovation not as central to our understanding of the changes happening in twentieth-century literature and history, but as instead a point of 'difficulty' Recognises Bowen's innovation, experimentation and her impact on her contemporaries and literary descendants From experiments in language and identity to innovations in the novel, the short story and life narratives, the contributors discuss the way in which Bowen's work straddles, informs and defies the existing definitions of modernist and postmodernist literature which dominate twentieth-century writing. The eleven chapters present new scholarship on Bowen's inventiveness and unique writing style and attachment to objects, covering topics such as queer adolescents, housekeeping, female fetishism, habit and new technologies such as the telephone.

In many works by modern British women writers, two women form a strong bond only to have that relationship stymied, paralyzed or interrupted. A female character, fearing discovery of covert lesbian desires, lashes out at another woman, resulting in emotional or physical harm to herself or others. Patricia Smith defines this narrative as "lesbian panic". What happens when a character or an author is unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire? For Smith, lesbian panic is often a fear of losing one's identity and value within the heterosexual paradigm. Smith traces the history of "lesbian panic" through key works: Woolfe's "The Voyage Out" and "Mrs Dalloway"; Bowen's "The Little Girls" and "Eva Trout"; Brophy's "King of a Rainy Day"; Lessing's "The Golden Notebook"; and Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". Smith reveals how and why this panic is represented and she explores how postmodern lesbian writers have attempted to break away from this narrative.

Since the release of Wayne Koestenbaum's book, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, gender studies has begun to take an active interest in music. Opera, long viewed as strictly an establishment tradition, has in particular been given a second look by gender theorists. Can opera - an antiquated, Eurocentric bastion of high culture - in fact be subverting patriarchal authority in some fundamental way?