Comradeship of Cock? Gay porn and the entrepreneurial voyeur

Thirty years of academic and critical scholarship on the subject of gay porn have born witness to significant changes not only in the kinds of porn produced for, and watched by, gay men, but in the modes of production and distribution of that porn, and the legal, economic and social contexts in which it has been made, sold/shared, and watched. Those thirty years have also seen a huge shift in the cultural and political position of gay men, especially in the US and UK, and other apparently ‘advanced’ democracies. Those thirty years of scholarship on the topic of gay porn have produced one striking consensus, which is that gay cultures are especially ‘pornified’: porn has arguably offered gay men not only homoerotic visibility, but a heritage culture and a radical aesthetic. However, neoliberal cultures have transformed the operation and meaning of sexuality, installing new standards of performativity and display, and new responsibilities attached to a ‘democratisation’ that offers women and men apparently expanded terms for articulating both their gender and their sexuality. Does gay porn still have the same urgency in this context? At the level of politics and cultural dissent, what’s ‘gay’ about gay porn now? This essay questions the extent to which processes of legal and social liberalization, and the emergence of networked and digital cultures, have foreclosed or expanded the apparently liberationary opportunities of gay porn. The essay attempts to map some of the political implications of the ‘pornification’ of gay culture on to ongoing debates about materiality, labour and the entrepreneurial subject by analyzing gay porn blogs

From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877

"The Cambridge History of the Gothic was conceived in 2015, when Linda Bree, then Editorial Director at Cambridge University Press, first suggested the idea to us

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender and Feeling

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel is the first monograph systematically to explore the relationship between George Eliot and Gothic genres. It considers the ways in which the author’s ethics link to sensational story-telling tropes. Reappraising the major works of fiction, this study compares passages of Eliot’s writing with sequences from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic works. The author examines, for example, Eliot’s deployment of the incarcerated virgin in Middlemarch, doppelgängers in Romola and vampiric queerness in the world of fashion in Daniel Deronda. In doing so, Eliot is raised from the boundaries of social realism and placed within a broader and richer Victorian literary scene than has previously been considered

The Sad Fortunes of ‘Stylish Things’: George Eliot and the Languages of Fashion

A discussion of fashion languages in George Eliot's 'The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton' (1855

‘Self and Society’

This chapter looks at self and identity in contemporary hair styling and culture

The dandy novel as fashion text: Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and fashion editorial.

The presence of fashion in fiction is often overlooked in traditional studies of English Literature but it holds an important place in the development of the nineteenth-century novel. In fact, novels themselves were fashionable items so it is no surprise that they would come to depict ‘the fashionable world’ of the Regency period. This chapter will introduce some approaches to the study of fashion in nineteenth-century fiction in order to discuss Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) by Edward Bulwer Lytton as an example of ‘a fashion text’, which had a lasting effect on the Victorian idea of the male body. In this novel, the fashioned male body is an index of bourgeois modernity. When appropriately attired, Henry Pelham, the protagonist, becomes socially mobile. The combination of different genres and bodies (fashioned or anti-social) make the novel a key counterpoint for the understanding of Victorian modernity. Bulwer himself became a notorious literary celebrity at the time and it was assumed that Henry Pelham was based on the author himself. Pelham marked the end to the styles worn by Beau Brummel and heralded a more understated menswear that followed the natural line of the body. The establishment of Henry’s ‘classic’ style arguably takes precedent over the narrative itself. The novel articulates the fashion concepts of newness, obsolescence, body discipline and public taste, all as aids to social mobility. It is a narrative of fashion theory, and Pelham is actually a novel that in both content and promotion strategies become a highly fashionable text. It is not surprising, then, that Pelham demonstrated contemporary anxieties about popular fiction and material culture. Thomas Carlyle’s objections in Sartor Resartus (1833-4) present the language of the novel as being retrograde. This chapter will argue that this so-called retrograde element was an important part of the development of the novel as it emulated and parodied the voice of fashion journalism that was already in existence. After explaining the genre and some relevant theoretical elements from the study of fashion, I will focus on Chapter 48 of the second edition of the novel. Here the story pauses and the reader is presented with twenty-two maxims designed to educate the reader in contemporary sartorial codes. I will place the maxims against fashion editorial from the periodical Gentleman's Magazine of Fashions, Fancy Costumes and the Regimentals of the Army and will give a close reading of the two as I explore the relationships between them. In both instances, the body, masculinity, taste, effeminacy and race are all discussed in the construction of the male fashioned body. To supplement the discussion I will also comment on the critical reception of the novel, both in the mainstream literary press and also in the fashion press, where the novel was reviewed in markedly different ways. There is an unusual relationship between fiction and fashion editorial in post-Napoleonic society, which contributes to what Winifred Hughes calls the ‘radical instability of tone’ in the novel

“Life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces”: the silver-fork novel, George Eliot and the fear of the material

This article investigates the connection between the writing of George Eliot and the silver-fork novel. As a journalist in the 1850s, George Eliot satirized the form for being patronizing to both female readers and writers alike, but as a novelist she had a preoccupation with the genre. Along with critics such as William Hazlitt, Eliot was uncomfortable with fashionable novels, with their narrowness and also with their superficial treatment of language and materialist aesthetic. In her fiction, Eliot sought to correct many of the narrative and linguistic strategies of silver-fork fiction, particularly by resisting the surface-orientated and metonymic nature of the writing. Consequently, in her fiction, fashionable life seems to lead to fear, alienation and even murder, sometimes real and sometimes metaphorical: it enters the territory of Gothic aesthetics. This slippage of genres finds its apotheosis in Daniel Deronda (1876–77), which is presented as a “re-imagining” of the silver-fork novel. Eliot uses the tropes and language of the genre, but subverts the surface-orientated descriptions and behaviour of her characters by giving them Gothic resonances. Taking passages from Catherine Gore's novel Mothers and Daughters: A Tale of the Year 1830 (1831), the author argues that fashionable fiction already had Gothic adumbrations which Eliot, in her reworking of the form, was able to exploit. Drawing additional material from a number of fashionable novels and critical sources, and also from Roland Barthes’ sociolinguistic study The Fashion System (1967), the author explores the notion of the “fashion text” in the hands of a secular humanist novelist

Daniel Deronda’s Jewish Panic

The chapter looks at queerness and Gothic tropes, particularly vampirism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and evaluates the idea of ‘Gothic queerness’ in a work of nineteenth-century Realism

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel Genres, Gender and Feeling

Royce Mahawatte critically compares the frightening, startling and melodramatic moments in George Eliot's fiction with excerpts from Gothic and sensation novels and in doing so argues that suspenseful plotting, and Gothic figures and tropes, play a role within Eliot's ambitions for the Victorian novel.Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Note on Names -- List of abbreviations -- Prologue -- Introduction: 'half-womanish, half-ghostly': George Eliot and the Inheritance of the Gothic -- Reimagining the Genres of Feeling -- 'as if there was a demon in me': 'Janet's Repentence'and the Evangelical Gothic -- 'with two names written on it': Sensation Narratives in Adam Bede -- 'of one texture with the rest of my existence':'The Lifted Veil' and the Tale of the Supernatural -- Uncanny Women, Fearing Men -- Counterfeit Gothic Heroines in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch -- Romola and Felix Holt, The Radical: The Pursuits of Paranoid Men -- Finale: Daniel Deronda: Sensationalized Society, Gothicized Self -- Epilogue -- Notes -- List of Works Cited and Consulted -- IndexRoyce Mahawatte critically compares the frightening, startling and melodramatic moments in George Eliot's fiction with excerpts from Gothic and sensation novels and in doing so argues that suspenseful plotting, and Gothic figures and tropes, play a role within Eliot's ambitions for the Victorian novel.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries