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  • 39 - Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy

  • from How to Recognize the Queer Past before (and during) the Advent of Medicalization
  • Edited by Benjamin Kahan, Louisiana State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature
    Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 705-720

  • Summary

    It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.