Queer Friendship: Male Intimacy in the English Literary Tradition

by George E. Haggerty

Overview

Friendship in the classical world was celebrated as among the highest human achievements: nothing was more likely to lead to the divine than looking for it in the eyes of a friend. In exploring the complexities of male-male relations beyond the simple labels of sexuality, Queer Friendship shows how love between men has a rich and varied history in English literature. The friend could offer a reflection of one's own worth and a celebration of a kind of mutuality that was not connected to family or home. These same-sex friendships are memorable because they give shape to the novels of which they are a part, and question the assumption that the love between friends is different from the love between lovers. Queer Friendship explores English literary friendship in three ways: the elegiac, the erotic, and the platonic, by considering a myriad of works, including Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A. H. H.', and Dickens' Great Expectations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108418751
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2018
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

George E. Haggerty is Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of English, University of California, Riverside.

Table of Contents

Introduction: male friendship and Greek love; 1. Elegiac friendship; 2. Erotic friendship; 3. Platonic friendship; Epilogue: queer friendship in Isherwood's A Single Man.

Editorial Reviews

'The author makes substantive inquiry into the fluidity of male-male relations as depicted in such canonical novels as Tristram Shandy, Jacob’s Room, and Great Expectations, bringing to the fore the nature and worth of male friendship, its tether to shifting socioeconomic concerns throughout English history, its commentary on male sexuality, and its influence on readers’ interpretation of said texts.' J. Neal, Governors State University, Illinois

'Haggerty’s book opens new possibilities for queer scholarship, which is perhaps its crowning achievement.' Jason S. Farr, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

From the Publisher