Queer is a good nineteenth-century American word, appearing almost everywhere in the literature of the time. And, as often as not, the nineteenth-century use of the word seems to anticipate the sexually specific meanings it would later accrue. Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century makes available again a set of literary texts from the long American nineteenth century in which the queer appears in all its complex range of meanings.
Series Editor:
Christopher Looby
Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles
Staff Editorial Contact:
Walter Biggins, Editor-in-Chief wbiggins@upenn.edu
In 1901, Sarah Orne Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island, a novel about queer kinship. Written a few years into her decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, the novel envisions the saltmarsh as a figure for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.
Charles Warren Stoddard’s only novel features a protagonist who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of nineteenth-century San Francisco—the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. This Q19 volume includes three of Stoddard’s Hawaiian travel sketches, a critical introduction, and extensive annotations.
"Ethel's Love-Life" and Other Writings presents an annotated edition of what's sometimes called the first American "lesbian" novel, with an introduction by Christopher Looby, as well as a collection of author Margaret J. M. Sweat's poetry and her published essays on Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, the novel, and the friendships of women.
The stories gathered here explore the vagaries of sexual desire, gender identity, and erotic attachment, revealing the surprising queerness of nineteenth-century American literature.
In brilliant artist Cecil Dreeme, narrator Robert Byng finds a friend unlike any he has known before. But is Cecil the man he claims to be, and can their friendship survive the dangers they will soon face together?
