Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities

by Holly Furneaux

Overview

This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire. Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191609923
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	12/10/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Dr Holly Furneaux is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester. Queer Dickens, her first monograph, draws on her interests in nineteenth-century literature, histories of sexuality, and Victorian cultures of feeling. She has published articles in Nineteenth Century Literature, Philological Quarterly, and The Dickensian on these areas, and has co-edited a special edition of Critical Survey on the topic of 'Dickens and Sex'. She was recently principal organiser of the British Association for Victorian Studies annual conference on the theme of 'Victorian Feeling: Touch, Bodies, Emotions', and is a regular organiser of the venerable Dickensian tradition of 'Dickens Day'.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Telling it Straight: Dickens in a Queer Context1. Reconfiguring the Domestic: Bachelor Dads2. Serial Bachelorhood and Counter-Marital Plotting3. Families of Choice: Homoerotic Intermarriage and Sibling Triangulation4. Homotropics: Queer Travels and New Homelands5. "It is impossible to be Gentler": The Homoerotics of Nursing6. The Gentle Man's Queer Touch: Reparative MasculinitiesPostscript: Doing Dickens: The Queer Politics of Adaptation

Editorial Reviews

"What is especially exciting about Furneaux's account is that it not only at long last brings the body of Dickens's writing within the compass of queer theory, but it suggests a new turn in queer theory itself." —Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

"The scholarly energy and optimism that infuses this book is both infectious and persuasive." —Dickens Quarterly

From the Publisher