A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition

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Yale University Press, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 456 pages
While many books have been written about gay writing, this is the first full-scale account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present. Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, it includes chapters on the significant periods of cultural history (the Greek and Roman civilisations, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, the American major writers (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Proust) and on common themes (boyhood, mourning, masturbation). A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it covers a definitive history of a tradition, it covers a massive field in terms of time (from Homer to Edmund White), literary status (from cultural icons like Virgil and Dante to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett), and location (from Mishima's Tokyo and Abu Nuwas' Baghdad to David Leavitt's New York).

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About the author (1998)

Woods is reader in lesbian & gay studies at the Nottingham Trent University

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