Imre: A Memorandum

by Edward Prime-Stevenson

Overview

At a cafe in Budapest, Oswald, a British ambassador in his thirties, meets the young, handsome Imre, a Hungarian military officer. The two develop a strong friendship through their shared interest in art, but as their relationship grows more serious, they begin spending hours upon hours sharing their innermost secrets.

Eventually, their friendship turns to romance, a partnership between equals who respect and cherish one another despite the obstacles of an intensely homophobic society.

Published in a time when homosexuality was largely criminalized, Imre: A Memorandum offered a hopeful narrative immersed in gay history that would prove both inspiring and instructional for generations to come.

Imre: A Memorandum is a novel by Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson. Originally published in 1906 and written while Prime-Stevenson was living as an expatriate in Europe, the novel is a ground-breaking, positive story of romance between two men.

Throughout his career, Prime-Stevenson sought to dispel falsehoods surrounding the history of homosexuality. Writing under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, Prime-Stevenson took great care to insulate himself from the reprisal common to the period in which he worked.

Despite the initial printing being limited to only 500 copies Prime-Stevenson is now recognized as a pioneering advocate for the rights of the LGBTQI community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783368923389
Publisher:	Outlook Verlag
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.15(d)

About the Author

James Gifford is a Professor of Humanities at Mohawk Valley Community College, Utica, NY. He is the author of Daynefords Library: American Homosexual Writing 1900-1913 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Edward Prime-Stevenson:A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Imre: A Memorandum

Introduction to the Appendices

Appendix A: On the Origin of Imre

Appendix B: The Medical Establishment and Homosexuality—A Sample Case Study

Appendix C: Homosexuality and the Artistic Temperament

Appendix D: Excerpts from The Intersexes (1908)

Appendix E: From Life to Fiction

Appendix F: “The Most Peculiar Friend I Have Ever Had”

Appendix G: A Contemporary Review of Imre

Works Cited and Recommended Reading

Editorial Reviews

Like Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider, Prime-Stevenson’s homosexual characters spin out threads of mutual recognition and loving affirmation. An invaluable literary document, Imre is also an unexpectedly absorbing fiction, here accompanied by an excellent scholarly apparatus.” — John W. Crowley, editor of Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard

“Not only are we given Prime-Stevenson’s text in the most readable form it has ever enjoyed, but also an eloquent introduction that illuminates both the life of this mysterious author and the historical and literary significance of this, his most important work, and a fascinating sequence of appendices. This edition is a piece of scholarship as exciting as it is rigorous.” — David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, editors of Pages Passed From Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Literature in English from 1748 to 1914

“This edition shows how carefully the novel is positioned geographically at the very margins of Europe at the very end of the Belle Époque, and hownearly a century after its compositionthe novel not only has a good deal to say about its day, but also our own.” — David Bergman, Towson University, author of Gaiety Transfigured

From the Publisher

"This edition shows how carefully the novel is positioned geographically at the very margins of Europe at the very end of the Belle Époque, and hownearly a century after its compositionthe novel not only has a good deal to say about its day, but also our own."

David Bergman

"Not only are we given Prime-Stevenson's text in the most readable form it has ever enjoyed, but also an eloquent introduction that illuminates both the life of this mysterious author and the historical and literary significance of this, his most important work, and a fascinating sequence of appendices. This edition is a piece of scholarship as exciting as it is rigorous."

David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell

"Like Whitman's noiseless, patient spider, Prime-Stevenson's homosexual characters spin out threads of mutual recognition and loving affirmation. An invaluable literary document, Imre is also an unexpectedly absorbing fiction, here accompanied by an excellent scholarly apparatus."

John W. Crowley