Chances Are: Contingency, Queer Theory and American Literature

This innovative work makes use of psychoanalytic, queer, and narrative theories to read nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and demonstrate how the concept of contingency—whether chance, accident, luck, or mutation—enriches our understanding of how queer sexualities are articulated.

Perhaps love always carries an element of contingency (our attraction to a particular person can be arbitrary and inexplicable), and a sense of necessity (we find that we cannot imagine life wit...