Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.10 (660 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1558492593 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-09-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"literary criticism with a personal touch" according to A Customer. The acid test of a book like this is whether or not you can disagree with some of the author's opinions but still want to keep reading, and Woodhouse succeeds just fine at passing this test. The openly personal nature of his readings of the texts he chooses excuses the leaving-out of so much (for instance, a gay "canon" with nothing about Gordon Merrick?), and the author's articulateness makes me hope he'll write a sequel.. Flat-out Brilliant This book not only offers incredible insight into the work of gay fiction writers, it offers brilliant observations about what it's like to live life as a gay man. Woodhouse's ideas are original, compelling, and dead-on. My only reservation is that too few readers will be brave or intelligent enough to take Woodhouse's ideas and observations and apply them to their own lives. That's where they belong.. A Customer said Don't Miss It. One of the more engaging and refreshing studies of its type, though not without its controversial readings of the literature, much of which is not as insightful as this.
While gay male literary criticism abounds, much of it is based in the academy and uses the critical perceptions of postmodernism and queer theory to elucidate both popular and literary work. Whether praising Dennis Cooper's transgressive narratives over David Leavitt's assimilationist novels, or preferring Samuel Delany's perversely brilliant The Mad Man over Stephen McCauley's popular The Object of My Affection, Woodhouse makes his cases with flair and panache and will delight and infuriate even the most stolid lover of literature. In this context, Reed Woodhouse's Unlimited Embrace shines out like a beacon. Such a project is fraught with difficulty, and Woodhouse is
Written in a personal voice, Unlimited Embrace is as much about gay identity as about gay literature. In the fiction of Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, James Purdy, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, Ethan Mordden, Dennis Cooper, David Leavitt, and Neil Bartlett, Woodhouse finds intimate glimpses of lives previously veiled in euphemism, slander, and contempt and now striving to take new form. Although the book ends with a sober consideration of the literary legacy of AIDS, Unlimited Embrace is more celebration than lamentan affirmation of the enduring power of literature to shape life.. More than that, he raises questions about sexual identity and desire, defiance and wit, that are as relevant to straight readers as to gay ones. In this pathbreaking book, a gay literary critic evaluates a half-century of fictional works "by, for, and about" homosexual men and situates them in the context of an emerging American gay culture. Reed Woodhouse shows how the best gay fiction of the period, like all good literature, not only reflected but anticipated social changes that were afootfrom the founding of the first enduring gay rights organizations through the Stonewall riots to the ambiguous mainstreaming of homosexuality that continues today. The canon Wood