[Yvonne Ivory] The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850-1930 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)(pdf){Zzzzz}[BЯ]

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? What drew John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater to write socio-cultural studies of the era? Or Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Vita Sackville-West, and Louis Couperus—to name but a few—to set novels and plays in Renaissance Italy? That question is at the heart of this volume, which begins by showing that the Renaissance (as depicted by German and British intellectuals from 1850 onward) was an era whose hallmarks were beauty, self-expression, criminality, and sexual dissidence. As new laws and sciences emerged that banned or pathologized relations between members of the same sex, this imagined Renaissance which married beautiful bodies to criminality and expansive self-fashioning provided models of same-sex love that went beyond the prevailing paradigm of ethereal and pedagogical Greek Love. The first study to address the close ties between the anarchist-individualist and gay rights movements in 1890s Germany, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style suggests, too, that if we are to begin to map out the genealogy of our own era's consummate type, the impeccably stylish gay man, we might look to the nineteenth-century's peopling of the Renaissance with sexually corrupt—but aesthetically immaculate—individualists.

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Review
'The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style is an engaging book, in which the author handles an impressive variety of material, which spans historiography, sexology, biography and literary texts. Academics and students interested in the history of sexuality will find in it a persuasive and welcome addition to the recent scholarship on the ancient Greek roots of nineteenth-century male homoerotic writing.' - Stefano Evangelista, Ravenna

'her [Ivory's] unilateral, comparative approach brings many previously hidden lines of investigation into view...the sheer sweep of material, both mainstream and marginal, is impressive as Ivory melds literary texts and sexology with historiography and biography...[an] undoubtedly valuable work. By a fusion of cultural history with textual readings, close analysis of British and German sexology, and detailed evaluations of the roles of three key figures across genders and nationalities, Ivory consolidates the importance of the Renaissance in the queer self-fashioning of modern gender identities.' - Nick Kneale, Modern Language Notes
Book Description
This book shows how British and German sexual dissidents deployed discourses of Renaissance self-fashioning in their lives and writings to counter the prevailing model of the criminal homosexual

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (7 May 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0230219977
ISBN-13: 978-0230219977