This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect. They consider commitment in all its guises, particularly relationships beyond and aside from monogamous partnering. These include chosen and involuntary long-term commitments to families, friends, pets, and coworkers; to the care of others and care of self; and to financial, psychiatric, and carceral institutions. Whether considering the enduring challenges of chronic illnesses and disability, including HIV and chronic fatigue syndrome; theorizing the queer family as a scene of racialized commitment; or relating the grief and loss that comes with caring for pets, the contributors demonstrate that attending to the long term offers a fuller understanding of queer engagements with intimacy, mortality, change, dependence, and care. Contributors. Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Scott Herring, Annamarie Jagose, Amy Jamgochian, E. Patrick Johnson, Jaya Keaney, Heather Love, Sally R. Munt, Kane Race, Amy Villarejo, Lee Wallace

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect. They consider commitment in all its guises, particularly relationships beyond and aside from monogamous partnering. These include chosen and involuntary long-term commitments to families, friends, pets, and coworkers; to the care of others and care of self; and to financial, psychiatric, and carceral institutions. Whether considering the enduring challenges of chronic illnesses and disability, including HIV and chronic fatigue syndrome; theorizing the queer family as a scene of racialized commitment; or relating the grief and loss that comes with caring for pets, the contributors demonstrate that attending to the long term offers a fuller understanding of queer engagements with intimacy, mortality, change, dependence, and care. Contributors. Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Scott Herring, Annamarie Jagose, Amy Jamgochian, E. Patrick Johnson, Jaya Keaney, Heather Love, Sally R. Munt, Kane Race, Amy Villarejo, Lee Wallace

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines--art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies--he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.

Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can--and should--get to another country.

What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging. Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright's magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen's writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City. Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.

First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's ""Autobiography of an Androgyne"" charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the ""third sex"" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless ""fairie"" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male ""inverts.""This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines--art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies--he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.

Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can--and should--get to another country.

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

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.

What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging. Aging Moderns provides portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism. The Harlem Renaissance dancer Mabel Hampton dispelled stereotypes about aging through her queer of color performances at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Herring explores Ivan Albright's magic realist portraits of elders, Tillie Olsen's writings on the aging female worker, and the surrealistic works made by Charles Henri Ford and his caregiver Indra Bahadur Tamang at the Dakota apartment building in New York City. Showcasing previously unpublished experimental art and writing, this deeply interdisciplinary book unites new modernist studies, American studies, disability studies, and critical age studies. Aging Moderns rethinks assumptions about literary creativity, the depiction of old age, and the boundaries of modernism.

The verb declutter has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it's only a matter of time. Articles containing tips and tricks on how to get organized cover magazine pages and pop up in TV programs and commercials, while clutter professionals and specialists referred to as clutterologists are just a phone call away. Everywhere the sentiment is the same: clutter is bad.
In The Hoarders, Scott Herring provides an in-depth examination of how modern hoarders came into being, from their onset in the late 1930s to the present day. He finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America. Herring introduces us to Jill, whose countertops are piled high with decaying food and whose cabinets are overrun with purchases, while the fly strips hanging from her ceiling are arguably more fly than strip. When Jill spots a decomposing pumpkin about to be jettisoned, she stops, seeing in the rotting, squalid vegetable a special treasure. I've never seen one quite like this before, she says, and looks to see if any seeds remain. It is from moments like these that Herring builds his questions: What counts as an acceptable material life--and who decides? Is hoarding some sort of inherent deviation of the mind, or a recent historical phenomenon grounded in changing material cultures? Herring opts for the latter, explaining that hoarders attract attention not because they are mentally ill but because they challenge normal modes of material relations. Piled high with detailed and at times disturbing descriptions of uncleanliness not for the faint of heart, The Hoarders delivers a sweeping and fascinating history of hoarding that will cause us all to reconsider how we view these accumulators of clutter.

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.

On August 21, 1978, a year before his seventieth birthday, Samuel Steward (1909-93) sat down at his typewriter in Berkeley, California, and began to compose a remarkable autobiography. No one but his closest friends knew the many different identities he had performed during his life: as Samuel Steward, he had been a popular university professor of English; as Phil Sparrow, an accomplished tattoo artist; as Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, a prolific essayist in the first European gay magazines; as Phil Andros, the author of a series of popular pornographic gay novels during the 1960s and 1970s. Steward had also moved in the circles of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Alfred Kinsey, among many other notable figures of the twentieth century. And, as a compulsive record keeper, he had maintained a meticulous card-file index throughout his life that documented his 4,500 sexual encounters with more than 800 men. The story of this life would undoubtedly have been a sensation if it had reached publication. But after finishing a 110,000-word draft in 1979, Steward lost interest in the project and subsequently published only a slim volume of selections from his manuscript. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, Jeremy Mulderig has integrated Steward's truncated published text with the text of the original manuscript to create the first extended version of Steward's autobiography to appear in print--the first sensational, fascinating, and ultimately enlightening story of his many lives told in his own words. The product of a rigorous line-by-line comparison of these two sources and a thoughtful editing of their contents, Mulderig's thoroughly annotated text is more complete and coherent than either source alone while also remaining faithful to Steward's style and voice, to his engaging self-deprecation and his droll sense of humor. Compellingly readable and often unexpectedly funny, this newly discovered story of a gay life full of wildly improbable--but nonetheless true--events is destined to become a landmark queer autobiography from the twentieth century.

Lines on the Land

Writers, Art, and the National Parks

Scott Herring

The nineteenth-century photographer William Henry Jackson once complained of the skepticism with which early descriptions of Yellowstone were met: the place was too wondrous to be believed. The public demanded proof, and a host of artists and writers obliged. These early explorers possessed a vigorous devotion to the young nation's wilderness--the naturalist John Muir famously toured the land from Wisconsin to Florida on foot--and through their work established aesthetic categories that exist to this day. In "Lines on the Land, " Scott Herring contends that these writers and artists were canon makers, recognizing the national parks as naturally occurring works of art and conferring upon them a cultural prestige: the parks were the splendid focal points of the American landscape.

These early, canonizing works are homages to a vast, untouched wilderness. This praise would gradually give way, however, to a distinctly American anger--what Herring calls "outraged idealism." Later generations were faced with a changing culture that had imperfectly absorbed, and even misrepresented, the national-park aesthetic. The postwar park was overrun by cars and tourists who could not possibly match the pioneering naturalists' profound commitment to and appreciation for their surroundings. The collective tone of the parks' chroniclers, as a result, evolved from celebration of awesome beauty to indignation over the perceived corruption of the parks, both as an ideal and as actual physical settings.

Herring traces this shift through the work of a wide spectrum of creative minds, from early figures such as Muir and Thomas Moran to later observers of the parks such as Ansel Adams, Sylvia Plath, Edward Abbey, and Rick Bass. The text is punctuated by autobiographical "interchapters," in which Herring relates the book's chief themes to his own experiences in Yellowstone National Park.

"Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism"

At the start of the twentieth century, tales of "how the other half lives" experienced a surge in popularity. People looking to go slumming without leaving home turned to these narratives for spectacular revelations of the underworld and sordid details about the deviants who populated it.
In this major rethinking of American literature and culture, Scott Herring explores how a key group of authors manipulated this genre to paradoxically evade the confines of sexual identification. "Queering the Underworld" examines a range of writers, from Jane Addams and Willa Cather to Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes, revealing how they fulfilled the conventions of slumming literature but undermined its goals, and in the process, queered the genre itself. Their work frustrated the reader's desire for sexual knowledge, restored the inscrutability of sexual identity, and cast doubt on the value of a homosexual subculture made visible and therefore subject to official control.
Herring is persuasive and polemical in connecting these writers to ongoing debates about lesbian and gay history and politics, and "Queering the Underworld" will be widely read by students and scholars of literature, history, and sexuality.

The verb "declutter" has not yet made it into the "Oxford English Dictionary," but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it's only a matter of time. Articles containing tips and tricks on how to get organized cover magazine pages and pop up in TV programs and commercials, while clutter professionals and specialists referred to as "clutterologists" are just a phone call away. Everywhere the sentiment is the same: clutter is bad.
In "The Hoarders," Scott Herring provides an in-depth examination of how modern hoarders came into being, from their onset in the late 1930s to the present day. He finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America. Herring introduces us to Jill, whose countertops are piled high with decaying food and whose cabinets are overrun with purchases, while the fly strips hanging from her ceiling are arguably more fly than strip. When Jill spots a decomposing pumpkin about to be jettisoned, she stops, seeing in the rotting, squalid vegetable a special treasure. "I've never seen one quite like this before," she says, and looks to see if any seeds remain. It is from moments like these that Herring builds his questions: What counts as an acceptable material life--and who decides? Is hoarding some sort of inherent deviation of the mind, or a recent historical phenomenon grounded in changing material cultures? Herring opts for the latter, explaining that hoarders attract attention not because they are mentally ill but because they challenge normal modes of material relations. Piled high with detailed and, at times, disturbing descriptions of uncleanliness, "The Hoarders" delivers a sweeping and fascinating history of hoarding that will cause us all to reconsider how we view these accumulators of clutter.