Literature

This entry contains the following:

I. OVERVIEW
Judith Roof

II. THE STUDY OF
Judith Roof

III. POPULAR
Judith Roof

IV. GAY, CREATIVE
Gregory Woods

V. LESBIAN, CREATIVE
renée c. hoogland

I. OVERVIEW

All cultures have literature, which consists of the various genres through which stories might be told. Although many cultures consider oral traditions and less formal genres of written storytelling (such as pulp or popular fiction, pornography, and comic books) as "low" literature and more formal, complex, and challenging written genres as "high" literature, all literature reflects the practices, mores, and aesthetic values of the culture within which it is produced and read.

Literature treats the most central and important patterns of life and death, including heroism, courtship and marriage, and the rites of passage of growing up. For this reason, literature, whether prose fiction, plays, or poetry, reproduces, reflects, and meditates upon the events, emotions, and elements that make up human lives. As basic elements of life, sex and gender play a crucial role in all literature in so far as literature considers what it means to be human—to be a good woman or man or to have families. Many plays, poems, and stories valorize ideal men and women, showing what it means to be masculine or feminine in a particular culture at a particular time.

ORAL LITERATURE

Oral literature includes the stories, poems, and songs that preserve and perpetuate the important myths and history of a society. These stories describe the creation of the world and its people, the rhythms of the seasons, the meaning of life and death, and the place of the individual in the order of things. They may also preserve tales of the feats of gods and famous heroes, celebrate famous love stories, and impart wisdom and traditions. Because these stories are repeated from generation to generation, they tend to be formulaic and preserved as poems or as ritual performances linked to specific contexts. They are also closely linked to the myths and rituals of religion.

Written literatures began partly as attempts to preserve oral traditions in cultures that had developed writing technologies and the ability to preserve texts. Although not all writing was devoted to storytelling, tales about gods and heroes began to be preserved, often as epic poems, but also as parts of religious traditions. The Greeks, for example, recorded tales about their gods and such heroes as Achilles and Odysseus. Tales about heroes not only preserved a sense of cultural history and identity, but also illustrated the qualities of ideal men, what their roles were in culture and history as well as the often less important and active roles of women. Myths about gods often linked gender roles both to the actions of gods and to the rituals of seasons and fertility. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, for example, linked seasonal changes to a story about how the cereal goddess Demeter lost her daughter Persephone for four months of each year to the jealousy of Hades, god of the underworld, a myth that accounted for winter. Chinese mythology understood creation as a war of emperors.

WRITTEN LITERATURE

Early cultures with forms of writing such as the various peoples of the Middle East, Greece, and later Rome began to record the feats of gods and heroes. In Greece, this emerged in the eighth century bce as two epic poems, the Iliad, about the feats of Achilles in the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War. Attributed to Homer, these poems demonstrate a sophisticated set of rhythms (metrics) and a formal style, aspects that would come to distinguish written from oral literature. At approximately the same time, the Chinese were also inscribing the sayings of Confucius as well as the love poems of Shi jing (1200 to 600 bce). The lyrical parts of the Hebrew Bible were also inscribed during this time. Later cultures such as Rome inherited the idea of a written literary culture from those who preceded them. Roman literature began around 300 bce and continued even after the disintegration of the Roman Empire between 200 and 500 ce as literature written throughout Europe in Latin. Like Greek literature after which it was modeled, Latin literature often recounted the feats of heroes as the poet Virgil does in Aeneid, a poem detailing how Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan war, founded Rome. As did the Greeks, the Romans composed love poetry and produced philosophical writings.

During and after the reign of Augustus Caesar (27 bce–14 ce), the poet Ovid composed his poetical rendition of the history of the world in Metamorphoses and was banished from Rome for writing Ars amatoria, a sophisticated and cynical poem about the arts of love and courtship. Ovid's work was influential throughout the Middle Ages in Europe where Latin was still a major language for literary composition. Gradually from 500 to 1000, various European peoples began to evolve their own languages, derived from Latin, but developing independently. These so-called Romance languages—including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian—also began to develop their own literatures. These literatures still followed the style of Rome in that they consisted of poetry describing religious or heroic accom-plishments—or like Ovid, concerned themselves with romance, a word that derives from the Romance language group in which they were composed.

In France, the first written literature was religious—plays and saints' lives derived from church ceremonies beginning in the tenth century. Epic poems about heroes quickly followed in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Beginning with the Song of Roland (c. 1100), which extolled the tragic virtues of Roland as he fought the Saracens threatening invasion from Spain, French chansons de geste, or songs about heroic deeds, became elaborate stories about the virtues and flaws of heroes, their kings, and their ladies, and the social order of feudalism in general. The chansons de geste were joined by sets of sophisticated love poems written and performed by traveling poets called troubadours. Nourished in the royal courts of the south of France, such poetry, which expounded a set of romantic relations called "courtly love," moved throughout France as Eleanor of Aquitaine, a prime patron of courtly poetry, married the future king of France in 1137.

Courtly love was perhaps more of a formal convention than a description of actual relationships between a highborn lady and a poet (often a nobleman) who could never hope to do more than court the object of his affections. The suitor owed the lady homage, self-sacrificing duty, and tokens of love. Her response was minimal, but even her glance could keep the lover's hopes alive. The rules of courtly relations were described in detail by Andreas Capellanus (also known as André le Chapelain) in The Art of Courtly Love (c. 1185), and combined with tales of heroic accomplishment, made up the subject of many tales of chivalry, including Arthurian legend. The chivalric ideal of courtly love spread throughout western Europe in such tales as Tristram and Isolt, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1370), and Dante's famous The Divine Comedy (completed 1321). It became more allegorical in the Romance of the Rose (c. 1237–1280) composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.

Stories of courtly love and heroism depended upon a strict gender code in which heroic lovers acknowledged their duties both to their lord and to their beloved lady. Other stories existed, however, which travestied these relations and made fun in general of those with excess pride, gluttony, and wealth. These fabliaux, as they were called, represented the other side of literary culture. Bawdy, fun, and irreverent, these tales of tricksters make their way into such later collections of tales as Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1348–1353) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), alongside more serious renditions of courtly heroics.

That difficult and often ill-fated love relations became the stuff of poets was true not only in Europe but also in China's Ming dynasty (1368–1644), where the opera had developed as the vehicle for telling such stories. In the Middle East, an Arabic collection of stories called Arabian Nights also treated issues of love, sex, murder, and adventure. Composed from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries, Arabian Nights consists of the stories a newly married queen Scheherazade tells her husband, a cruel sultan who has vowed to kill every woman he marries after one night because his first wife was unfaithful to him. Entertaining the king with stories keeps Scheherazade alive until the sultan relents and allows her to live.

Throughout the later Middle Ages to the present, poets have continued to write about the difficulties of love. Most of these writers have been male writers writing about beloved women, though there were women writers even in the late Middle Ages. Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430), for example, wrote lyrical love poetry in France. Until the nineteenth century, however, women were not generally prominent as writers.

From the Renaissance to the modern era, literature continually expanded its genres and subject matter, though love and its difficulties have always been a staple literary topic. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) treated history, but almost always love as well. Though courtly relations are still present in Shakespeare's work, his plays often combine the attitudes represented by both chivalric poetry and the more earthy aesthetic of folktales about the trickster. His plays also accomplish a certain social satire or commentary that identifies and pokes fun at the pride and presumptions of certain kinds of people such as the conceited Malvolio in Twelfth Night (c. 1600). In France other dramatists were refinding inspiration in classical stories of love, sacrifice, and heroism; Jean Racine (1639–1699) and Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) wrote about the tragic effects of love, while Moliére (1622–1673) satirized the foibles of the bourgeoisie.

Love and heroism continued to dominate the literary landscape until the development of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) satirized the heroic, the idea of a hero, and the conventions of writing itself, while novels written by women increasingly introduced hearth, home, and the loves of ordinary people as a subject for literature. The wry tales of bourgeois manners and courtship of Jane Austen (1775–1817) established the novel as a highly successful form for a rapidly enlarging reading public. Until the nineteenth century, literacy was restricted primarily to the upper classes. With the invention of cheaper printing technologies and ideals of universal education, more people began to read. The novel replaced lyric poetry as the major genre of literature, and because of its length, range, and audience, the novel began to shift the focus of literature from events of public importance such as heroism or the poetical difficulties of love and existence to the more commonplace happenings of individuals and families. The characters of novels were no longer noble or larger than life, but instead were interesting, often quirky members of bourgeois or even poor families.

In the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, the novel became the primary means by which gender relations, proper social conduct, and heroic ideals were examined and disseminated. For the first time, women writers such as Austen, Charlotte (1816–1855) and Emily Brontë (1818–1848), George Eliot (1819–1880), and George Sand (1804–1876) joined such male writers as Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) as prose fiction explored individual conscience and social issues, class difficulties, and the tragedies of poverty.

Dramatic literature gained renewed vigor in the late nineteenth century as playwrights as well began focusing on the social problems of contemporary society, focusing often on the inequities of gender relations. Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) wrote plays that explored the irrational excesses of gender assumptions.

By the twentieth century, literature had become less a recorder of social conventions and cultural myths and more a means of individual expression, especially as conventions and myths were reworked by such writers as Marcel Proust (1871–1922), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), James Joyce (1882–1941), William Faulkner (1897–1962), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), and Toni Morrison (b. 1931). Often experimental, twentieth-century literature focused on aesthetics, as did the modernist writers of the first half of the century, or on the problems of expression and the meaning of existence itself, as did the postmodern writers of the second half. By the twentieth century writing had become a profession shared by women and men. Sexuality had become much more openly described, and the conventions of gender themselves had come into question.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. 1994–2006. The Cambridge History of American Literature. 8 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bowman, John S., ed. 2000. Columbia Chronologies of Asian History and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Doody, Margaret Anne. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

González Echevarría, Roberto, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds. 1996. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lawall, Sarah, ed. 2001–2002. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd edition. 7 vols. New York: Norton.

Rogers, Pat, ed. 2001. The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

                                                      Judith Roof

II. THE STUDY OF

Since the late 1960s the relations between gender and literature have produced a rich, new perspective in literary studies. Recognizing that Western cultures were biased toward the masculine and patriarchal, literary critics influenced by feminist insights devised modes of criticism that focused on images of women, critiques of patriarchy, the rediscovery of women authors and their works, examinations of the differences between masculine and feminine writing, and an acknowledgment of women's particular perspective on the world. Following feminist insights, lesbian, gay male, and more recently queer theorists have deployed similar critical questions and methods to examine images of lesbians and gays in literature, critiques of homophobia, the rediscovery and identification of lesbian and gay male writers, and an acknowledgment of specifically lesbian and gay literary aesthetics.

The various women's movements of the twentieth century—the women's suffrage movement that occurred between 1890 and 1920 in the United States and from 1903 to 1928 in Britain and the feminist movement that began in the 1960s—invited a critical focus on the relations between gender and literature. The analysis of these relations commenced with Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, which answered the question of why there were few women authors with an investigation of the material conditions within which women lived, and the received ideas about female capabilities that limited women to only a few roles. Woolf followed this first essay with Three Guineas (1938) in which she continued her analysis of the ideological and material disadvantages of women. Woolf's work was joined by Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 treatise Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1953) to provide the critical basis for the emergence of feminist criticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminist criticism paved the way for gender studies, which considers the ways literature reflects and critiques the male/female system as a whole; and sexuality studies, which focuses on the ways concepts about sexual orientations and sexuality have influenced and are reflected in literature.

TEXTS BY WOMEN AND WOMEN IN TEXTS

Feminist literary criticism began with an investigation of how various literatures have portrayed female characters. Work about images of women in literature occupied the first decade of feminist critical endeavor, from 1968 until approximately 1978. Critics such as Kate Millett examined the ways patriarchal assumptions in literature demeaned women. Other literary critics, noting that many female authors had been hidden and/or ignored by male literary critics, began to "rediscover" and analyze literary works by such modern women authors as Woolf, Gertrude Stein, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Elizabeth Bowen, and Djuna Barnes, as well as make more prominent female authors from the past such as Christine de Pisan, Aphra Behn, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and Rachilde. This process, called "gynocriticism" by critic Elaine Showalter (1998), revealed the large number of women authors and their works that had been omitted from critical consideration by an academy that believed that women writers had little worth. The rediscovery of these female authors and their works contributed to a revision of the literary "canon," or set of works deemed worthy of critical study, which now includes many literary texts by women.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics also began to consider much more seriously literary works by women of color, including the narratives of female slaves, the poetry of colonial black women authors such as Phillis Wheatley, and the writing of more contemporary black and Hispanic women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. During this time as well, feminist critics began to pay more attention to the work of lesbian authors, such as Stein, whose descriptions of their experiences flew in the face of mainstream expectations about and images of women.

FRENCH FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

By the late 1980s, feminist criticism had developed a sophisticated set of methods for understanding and elucidating the relations between gender and literature. Some feminist critics and theorists, particularly such French writers as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Marguerite Duras, believed that because males and females occupy different places in the social order and thus have different perspectives on the world, women's use of language and style reflects both that different positioning and female bodily differences. Women's writing is an écriture feminine, a feminine writing that picks up and conveys different rhythms, images, economies, and values than writing premised on a more phallocentric worldview.

Other feminist critics such as Jane Gallop, Jacqueline Rose, and Barbara Johnson took up models of gender and identity from psychoanalysis, using Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's understandings of sexual difference as a way to understand how gender is inscribed in literary texts as well as how, if ever, the relative empowerment of masculine and feminine can be altered. Yet other feminist critics such as Lillian Robinson and Judith Newton took up issues of how women's material existence affected both what they wrote and how they wrote it. Many feminist critics, including Shari Benstock and Jane Marcus, continued to examine the relations between the sociocultural conditions within which specific female writers lived and wrote and the writing they produced.

Since the early 1990s, feminist criticism has focused increasingly on issues of race and transnationalism, trying to understand the interrelationships of gender, race, and national location as those different frameworks define the literatures women produce. This work has been stimulated by the critical writings of Gayatri Spivak and others and has been instrumental in making the writings of such Anglophone writers as Bharati Mukherjee and Anita Desai more visible.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Feminist engagements with issues of sexuality also provided a model for understanding the ways sexual orientation operates as both a theme and a set of styles in literature. Thinking about the relation between femininity and literary production invited a reconsideration of the relations between masculinity and literature as well as questions about how the sexual orientation of authors inflects what they write and how issues of sexual orientation themselves are conveyed in literature. Although issues of masculinity and literature have formed an important but less innovative area of study, primarily because literary practice itself was always understood as a masculine endeavor, issues of sexual orientation stimulated a much larger new critical project.

Issues of sexuality in literary study employ two broad strategies. The first is to understand the relation between a hidden identity such as homosexuality and the ways such a hidden identity is conveyed in literature through codes, allusions, and other indirect means. These encodements produce their own dynamic and literary aesthetic, defined by critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) as an "epistemology of the closet." The other critical tack is to analyze the configurations through which homosexualities and lesbian dynamics appear in literary and popular cultural texts, from the apparitional or invisible figuration of the lesbian identified by Terry Castle and Bonnie Zimmerman to the camp, burlesque, and hypermasculinization identified in gay male texts by such critics as Michael Warner and Robert K. Martin.

Issues of sexuality also inaugurated the more political category of "queer" studies, which examines literary and textual phenomena that play against the heterosexual and heteronormative impetus of mainstream culture. Inspired by homosexualities, the category of the queer positions itself less as literally gay or lesbian identity, and more as a position defined by its play on and perversion of sexual, patriarchal, capitalist, and other economies aligned with normative cultural practices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castle, Terry. 1993. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rooney, Ellen, ed. 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Showalter, Elaine. 1998. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Rev. edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free Press.

Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press.

                                               Judith Roof

III. POPULAR

Popular literature refers to fiction intended to please large audiences. Consisting primarily of novels, serialized novels, and short stories, popular literature is a market commodity aimed at specific target audiences defined often by gender, class, race, and age, such as housewives, teenage boys or girls, men, urban black populations, or gay or lesbian readers. The main purpose of popular literature is to entertain by providing predictable and formulaic stories often about extraordinary occurrences that happen to ordinary people. Such stories feed the fantasies, hopes, and frustrations of the groups who read them. Although some literature intended to be merely entertaining may also be innovative and have artistic value, most popular literature is unremarkable as art even if enjoyable as a pastime.

Popular literature appears in such genres as romance novels, westerns, detective fiction and urban crime tales, thrillers, science fiction, children's literature, and gothic horror novels. Each of these genres has a set recipe of plots and character types, which is repeated with variations in each successive publication. Each genre also has subgenres that also appeal to specific audiences, defined mainly by the gender and the age of the reader. There are heterosexual, gay male, and lesbian romance novels, for example. Detective and urban crime novels may involve white or black protagonists. Science fiction stories may appeal to those interested in hard science or in fantasy. There are adventure stories for children with girl heroines for girls and boy heroes for boys.

Literature in the form of oral stories for group entertainment has been present throughout history as epic poems about heroes' adventures and love affairs or folk stories about tricksters such as Renard the Fox or William Shakespeare's Falstaff. Still familiar are such Greek heroes as Achilles and Odysseus as well as the knights of the Round Table from Arthurian legend. And variations on jokes in which various categories of dupes (people from other states, women with certain colors of hair) are tricked continue to be told and enjoyed. These traditions of oral literature are the foundations for the romance, horror, action, and detective genres that nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishers gradually developed for sale to a reading public.

The phenomenon of popular literature as printed books to be purchased by individuals arose mainly in the nineteenth century as literacy became more widespread in the middle and lower classes, and especially as more women learned to read. Popular books and serials were also enabled by technological innovations in the paper and printing industries as well as the evolution of strategies for marketing and distribution. The invention of mechanical typesetting, the availability of cheaper, machine-made paper, and the development of faster printing presses helped make printed material cheaper and more affordable to greater numbers of people. Printed material was distributed through the mail as newspapers, and later as serialized stories and penny novels. Serialized stories had first appeared in England in 1698 as a way to avoid the extra tax on paper. Although popular, serials appeared less often as the British government imposed a tax on newspapers in 1712. The serial reappeared as a popular phenomenon in 1836 with the serial publication of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers. The first serial novel appeared in the United States in 1839, according to Radway, and serials became popular as a supplement pamphlet sent with newspapers at reduced rates through the mail. Although the U.S. Post Office Department determined in 1843 that these newspapers and their serialized supplements could no longer be sent at newspaper rates, the market for cheap books had been established.

GENDER AND GENRE

By the twentieth century the establishment of a large middle class with stay-at-home wives and mothers in the United States offered a large market of readers to whom romance novels might be sold. The practice of identifying specific groups of readers, such as middle-class housewives, and finding both products to please them and marketing and distribution strategies aimed at their habits and convenience, became a large part of paperback book publishing. Despite, however, the tendency to link popular literature in the form of romance novels to women as the primary consumers of such literature, the first scheme for distributing popular literature paperbacks as magazine supplements involved mystery stories sold with magazines at book and newspaper stands. Mercury Books' mysteries were joined in 1939 by Pocket Books' romances. The monthly publication of new volumes required that new books conform to the set formulas and characteristics of the genre that had been calculated to appeal to specific kinds of reading audiences—mysteries and horror thrillers to both men and women, westerns and science fiction to males, children's adventure stories to children, and romances, the largest category, to women. Paperback books began to be distributed through drug and grocery stores as well as magazine stands where people regularly shopped.

The formulaic character of popular mystery fiction helped refine the development of formulaic genres to targeted readerships. From the late 1930s to the 1950s the mystery genre spawned many popular protagonists regularly featured in entertaining but predictable narratives. Such characters as Ellery Queen, Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, Lord Peter Wimsey, Mike Hammer, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot figured in paperback novels purchased regularly by both male and female readers. The formulas of most of these novels involved an ingenious solution by a very sympathetic but somewhat idiosyncratic, often amateur, sleuth. Many mystery novels involved the kinds of courtly behavior practiced by Arthurian knights. Ladies in distress were rescued by unlikely and often cynical heroes. Although the mass market for mystery paperbacks seems to have died out somewhat in the 1950s, these characters spread from the pages of books to films, television series, and later reprintings of their series.

In the 1960s and 1970s, urban crime, thriller, and horror novels became widely popular. Like mystery stories, these novels appealed to both men and women and included some of the best-selling novels of all time. Iceberg Slim's and Donald Goines's novels about black urban existence were best-sellers targeted toward a black audience. William Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) and Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974) are still near the top of the all-time best-seller list, while Ian Fleming's James Bond series has been widely influential. Thrillers by Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and more recently Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), sell to huge audiences. These cliff-hanger novels extol the virtues of the clever, brave hero against the odds presented by international espionage, financial wrongdoing, and extensive, conspiratorial criminality. On their actions lies the fate of the Western world.

Like mystery, science fiction developed its pulp formulas and audience in the 1930s, more often in magazine and story collections than in novels. Although the genre was always linked to real or speculative science and often took place in the future, its renditions of culture and society, particularly of gender relations, tended to be conservative or anachronistic, preserving the secondary role of women in relation to the intrepid and heroic roles of men. Its primary audience was male.

Children's serial novels such as The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and The Motor Boys presented attractive children and teens from well-parented families who had extraordinary adventures and resolved all dilemmas ethically and generously. The mystery-adventure format of The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Motor Boys combined daring and virtue in formulaic encounters with greedy but nonpedophilic villains. The Bobbsey Twins provided tame adventures for both boys and girls that modeled bravery mixed with common sense. Unlike the deliciously dangerous dilemmas of gothic heroines, the child heroes of children's popular literature were models of behavior and virtue, teaching proper, but not constrained gender roles, the virtues of curiosity and work, and the attractiveness of gumption. More recently the huge best-selling Harry Potter series has captivated boys and girls as well as adult readers with issues of power and ethics in the fantastical, yet grounded world of a wizard's academy.

While mystery novels appealed to both men and women, science fiction to males of all ages, and children's books to boys and girls depending on the gender of their protagonists, romance novels were aimed primarily at women. Initially romance novels were modeled after Daphne du Maurier's best-selling gothic romance, Rebecca (1938). Looking for similarly exciting mixes of mystery, heroines in peril, and cross-class romantic involvement, other paperback publishers sought their own versions of the story. In 1960 Ace Books published Phyllis Whitney's Thunder Heights and Doubleday published Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn. These gothic romance tales created worlds of glamour, darkness, and mystery in which a heroine, whose qualities and upbringing are more like those of her readers, encounters a mysterious set of circumstances and conquers an enigmatic upper-class suitor.

Gothic romances were romantic, thrilling, and immensely popular, accounting for 24 percent of Dell's sales of paperbacks in 1971 (Radway 1984). Overall at that time, paperback publishers were churning out more than thirty-five gothic romance titles per month, but the genre soon saturated the market. There was renewed interest in romance novels in the early 1970s as they began to appear in more sexually explicit subgenres such as "erotic historicals," "Sweet savage romances," and "Bodice-rippers" (Radway 1984, p. 34). The increased explicitness of the romance sex scenes followed the taste for more scandalous material incited by the publication of two best-selling books in the two previous decades: Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956), a novel about small-town scandal, adultery, and sex, and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966), depicting a group of pill-popping women, reported to be the best-selling novel of all time.

In the 1970s as well, the gothic romance was joined by the historical romances of Barbara Cartland and the more modern romances involving wealthy powerful people, written by such best-selling authors as Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Harold Robbins, Colleen McCullough, and Sidney Sheldon. Scholars and critics have given many possible reasons for the popularity of the romance novel. Some suggest that romance fantasies enable women to escape their humdrum existence by offering a more exciting world in which ordinary women become the paramours of rich, enigmatic men. Others, such as Ann Douglas (1980), suggest that the popularity of romance novels reflects women's unhappy rebellion against feminist challenges to traditional female roles in the 1970s era of rising feminist activism. Certainly their popularity is due to a number of factors, including the availability of leisure time in which to read, the pleasures of repetition, the reassuring possibility that daily lives might still be exciting, and the availability of cheap books.

Most recently, popular fiction has developed a new genre, aimed at young women and teenage girls, involving sexually active, hip, urban career girls whose encounters with employers and family members result in absurd and humorous situations. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's The Nanny Diaries (2002) are examples of this genre.

POPULAR FICTION AND SEXUALITY

While the typical gothic romance novel did not include anything more than suggestions of torrid sexuality, the explicit character of these best-sellers made the public hunger for more graphic depictions of sex. Romance novels in their various genres supplied titillation short of pornography, which could not be distributed as openly as lurid romances. More graphic depictions of sexuality such as Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's Candy became scandalous best-sellers in the youth rebellions of the late 1960s as sexual mores became less repressive. At the same time the relaxation of the film production codes by which sexually explicit material in films had been repressed made film a more attractive medium for openly sexual material. By the 1970s, sexually explicit popular novels had to compete with the growing availability of films featuring nudity and explicit sexual situations and behavior, as well as with sexually explicit pornographic videotapes.

The overwhelming majority of popular books assume the heterosexuality of their characters and present a world grounded in male-female romance. The emergence of gay male and lesbian populations beginning in the late 1960s offered a new set of markets to popular literature publishers, though not markets with a large enough audience to justify mass publication and marketing of gay-themed books. Popular literature aimed at gay male and lesbian audiences tends to be published, at least initially, by smaller niche presses such as Alyson, Plume, and Naiad. In the 1970s and 1980s books treating gay male protagonists by such authors as S. E. Hinton, James Kirkwood, and Larry Kramer became more mainstream. Kirkwood's novel Some Kind of Hero (1975) was made into a film, and Kirkwood also cowrote the Broadway play A Chorus Line. Rita Mae Brown produced more mainstream lesbian novels, the most famous of which, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) has continued to sell large numbers of copies. Lesbian mystery writers such as Katherine V. Forrest have become widely popular among lesbian audiences.

Although electronic media may eventually replace books, reading continues on the World Wide Web. Some writers now post serialized novels on their web sites, and the formulas for popular fiction continue to evolve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloom, Clive. 1996. Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Douglas, Ann. 1980. "Soft-Porn Culture." New Republic 183(9): 25-29.

Jakubowski, Maxim, ed. 1996. The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. New York: Carroll and Graf.

Jordan, John O., and Robert L. Patten, eds. 1995. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Radway, Janice A. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Stryker, Susan. 2001. Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

                                                  Judith Roof

IV. GAY, CREATIVE

In its widest sense gay literature is writing that expresses, describes, or otherwise represents a spectrum of intense friendship, love, erotic desire, and sexual contact or relationship between male individuals as well as engaging with the social context of the ways in which those matters are received by the broader society. Such literature may be produced in any literate culture at any point in human history. More narrowly, some commentators argue that the concept of gay literature should be confined to a specific period since the late-nineteenth-century conceptualization of sexual "identities"—in this context homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality—are regarded as psychological states or conditions that affect the whole nature of the self and its social circumstances. In its narrowest definition gay literature dates from the mid-1960s in the West and is written only by gay authors, especially openly gay authors who subscribe to the aims and ethos of the gay liberation movement, which, following the models of the American civil rights and feminist movements, has demanded equality of rights and treatment for gay people across the spectrum of social institutions.

Throughout the history of literacies, the predominant mode of male homoerotic writing has been determined not by a universal essence of homosexual love but by broadly common social and cultural conditions that center on sexual segregation and male privilege. Wherever female virginity was prized above the education of girls, men made deeper alliances with one another than with women. Honored as a bearer of sons and strengthener of the bloodstock more often than as a soul mate, the highborn woman was protected against the acquisition of knowledge as much as she was protected against the eyes of the wrong men. Relationships between men were built on common interests stemming from shared levels of education, and relationships between men and boys were pedagogical, educating the boy up to the level of the man. Ideally, therefore, a meeting of bodies eventually would develop into a meeting of minds.

GAY LITERATURE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

The Greek Anthology, the medieval collection of more than 6,000 Ancient Greek and Byzantine poems, is a repository of such celebrations of boy love in its different moods. Most fully theorized in Plato's Symposium, Greek pederasty was governed by strict conventions that protected the reputations of male citizens and the boys—future citizens—they loved. Although not arguing against sexual relationships, or at least those tempered by rational self-control, Plato's dialogue recommends the refinement of love that transcends bodily need. Similar affirmations of institutionalized pederasty can be found in the literatures of China, Japan, India, Persia, Turkey, and the Arabian diaspora.

Much Greek poetry cites the precedence of the febrile passions of the gods in justifying the self-evident frailty of humankind in matters of the heart and the lower organs. Where Zeus and Ganymede or Apollo and Hyacinth went before, mortal men and boys were apt to follow. Indeed, men's taste for boys was traced meticulously back to its origins in a moment of divine inspiration on the part of an individual man. This candidate for the honor of being the first mortal man to desire those of his own sex sometimes was identified as Orpheus, sometimes as Thamyris, and sometimes as Laius. Significantly, the first two of those men were poets.

Many Roman poets wrote erotic verse about boys—with Virgil, Martial, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus being prominent examples—but they also wrote about women. The love of boys never was regarded as being incompatible with that of women. Correspondingly, Roman literature often is insulting about men with an exclusive interest in the same sex and even more insulting if any adult man showed signs of sexual passivity. Juvenal's satires are exemplary in their contempt for such abdications of the manly duties of citizenship.

GAY LITERATURE IN THE CHRISTIAN WEST

In the classical literature of male love Plato's Symposium, Theocritus's Idylls, Virgil's Eclogues, and Ovid's Metamorphoses had the most radical impact on man-loving and many more generally humanist poets of the Renaissance period. In England, Christopher Marlowe's passionate shepherd and Richard Barnfield's Ganymede were produced by writers obviously steeped in the homoerotic classics. Shakespeare's sonnets, though relatively sparing in classical references, clearly are derived from an ethos the poet had taken from his extensive reading of southern European literature and adapted to his northern emotional life. The controversy of the sonnets is not a recent one, as is often claimed, imposed on them by the irrelevant obsessions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century homosexuals. As early as 1640 John Benson reissued the poems, cutting some of them altogether (19, 56, 75, 76, 96, 126), changing the gender of the pronouns in others (101 and 108), and toning down phrases such as "sweet boy" (108) and "fair friend" (14) to "sweet love" and "fair love," respectively. The publisher wanted to avoid any impression of sinful practices.

In Christian Europe the condemnation of all sex except a narrow range of acts in the marital bed gave forbidden love a new status among the upper classes. In literature diverse figures such as Pietro Aretino, Théophile de Viau, John Wilmot (the Earl of Rochester), and the Marquis de Sade made a virtue of vice, boastfully expatiating on the ambisexuality of the libertine. This tradition helped shape a particular kind of fictional character. The Byronic hero and the antihero of the Gothic novel, perhaps derived from darkly seductive figures such as Milton's Satan, evolved, by way of major characters such as Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine and the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, into the gay villain of mid-twentieth-century fiction. The demonization of Oscar Wilde in 1895 added a fresh resonance to this stereotype of the sodomite as criminally seductive and subversive.

Across cultures and eras one of the most acceptable and therefore common ways of celebrating passionate friendships between adult men has been in circumstances or through representations of mourning. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh extravagantly mourns the death of Enkidu. In the Bible, David laments the loss of Jonathan: "I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Samuel 1:26). In the Iliad, Achilles laments the loss of Patroclus. In the Chanson de Roland, Roland laments the loss of Olivier.

The English pastoral elegy celebrated male love, usually in its most conventional guise as temperate friendship, through literary history from Edmund Spenser to A. E. Housman and Wilfred Owen. Again, the circumstance of mourning released writers from some of the restraints on intensity of expression where male love was concerned. Spenser's "Astrophel" commemorated Sir Philip Sidney, who had died in 1586. John Milton's "Lycidas" commemorated Edward King (died 1637); Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" commemorated Richard West (died 1742); Percy Shelley's "Adonais" commemorated John Keats (died 1821) (Shelley's heart would be wrapped in a manuscript of the poem during his cremation on the beach at La Spezia); Alfred Tennyson's "In Memoriam" commemorated Arthur Hallam (died 1833); Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis" commemorated Arthur Clough (died 1861); and Walt Whitman's poems from the American Civil War, culminating in the great elegy on Abraham Lincoln, "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd," resonated with echoes of the same sources.

Although it often was received by man-loving male readers in England as being "Greek" in spirit, Whitman's quintessentially American poetry was far more inclined to celebrate the adult male—and the working-class male at that—as something new and particular to the physical geography and social structures of the United States. In Whitman spiritual refinement is derived not from education and class but from bodily health and liberty.

GAY LITERATURE IN THE MODERN ERA

Heterosexuality and homosexuality, the new definitions of sexual identity that emerged through the popularization of sexology and psychoanalysis in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, coincided with other major technological, aesthetic, and social developments that have come to be seen as having the characteristics of modernism. In literature the modernist experiment was especially concerned with tempering the objective focus of high realism with more subjectivist approaches to a reality that increasingly was assumed to be pluralist and fragmented. The objective, omniscient narrator of the realist novel gave way to a stream of individual consciousnesses.

Under those new conditions writers seemed especially capable of scrutinizing the voluntary and involuntary bases of sexual desire in its protean manifestations. Many of the great modernist writers were homosexual or bisexual and took same-sex desire as one of their major topics. In France, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau combined major technical innovations with penetrative explorations of the nature of desire. In Germany, the novels of Thomas Mann and the poetry of Stefan George wrestled with the relationship between physical desire and spiritual desire as embodied in ethereal boys. In Greece, Constantine Cavafy elaborated a comparison between classical pederasty and modern homosexuality in poems that gave modern urban cruising its finest early expression. At opposite extremes of seriousness and frivolity Henry James and Ronald Firbank approached the matter of love from an oblique angle that is identifiably "queer" or even camp, subjecting hetero-sexuality to the distanced scrutiny of a discriminating aestheticism. Indeed, there is so much gay writing in modernism that one might go so far as to describe that movement as being intrinsically queer.

The antihomophobic novel of the twentieth century almost invariably suffered the consequences of its inherent flaw. Needing to argue politically the ordinariness of homosexuality and the moral neutrality of homosexual love, those novels were burdened with the necessity of a dull central character. This explains the unremarkable suburbanism of the eponymous central character of E. M. Forster's Maurice (written in 1913). Setting himself the task of countering prejudicial assumptions that homosexual men must be decadent, effeminate, and untrustworthy—a stereotype largely based on the version of Oscar Wilde that had been constructed in newspaper accounts of his trials—Forster had to contrast the dullness of the middle-class Maurice with the far more interesting figure of Risley, an aristocratic aesthete who is witty and seedy and ends up in jail.

This also can be said of the protagonists of some of the best-known gay novels published in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of those men are tediously self-absorbed. In Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Jim Willard is given a strong backhand at tennis so that he will not be assumed to be effeminate by homophobic readers, but that is his only talent. The literature informed by the postwar homosexual and gay movements was concerned principally with conveying what came to be called "positive images" by which the author was expected to counter negative public representations of homosexuals as untrustworthy, unpatriotic, unmanly, neurotic, immature, and generally unlikable. Positive gay literature had to convey the possibility of homosexual happiness within the requirements of social convention. The central characters of those novels would overcome the adversities of having to endure homophobia, would experience true love, and would settle down eventually to a solidly happy ending. Subsequent literature by and large has been released from these restrictive imperatives.

In light of the restrictive tendencies of politically influenced literary texts, it is not surprising that much of the most striking fiction about male-male relationships was the most transgressive, often elaborating on the interplay between eroticism and violence. In this respect the major figure of the mid-twentieth century was Jean Genet, whose work depended for one of its main effects not on the idea that men who love men can be as decent and unobtrusive as one's next-door neighbor and that books about them can be similarly unexceptional but on the idea that all love involves personal betrayal and that male bodies are the weapons with which both love and betrayal are effected.

CONTEMPORARY GAY LITERATURE

In Japan, Yukio Mishima superimposed the Samurai and ancient Greek traditions of homoeroticism on the everyday details of modern life, enlivening a realist perspective with his personal sadomasochistic interests. In the United States, encouraged by younger beat writers such as Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs combined an aggressive social critique with the celebration of a taste for adolescent boys in heroin-fed fantasies of a womanless universe. The technique of randomly cutting up his prose denies his characters any sentimental identification on the part of sympathetic readers. In the Netherlands, Gerard Reve based his radical aesthetic on an obsessive regard for the corporal punishment of socially deviant boys. In France, Tony Duvert wrote as if the nouveau roman had been hijacked for the purposes of a militant pederasty.

The changing possibilities for more assimilationist gay writers may be exemplified best in the career of the postwar British poet Thom Gunn. Gunn began as a poet of restraint, guarded and edgily ironic; his poems were virtuosic in their application of seventeenth-century techniques and forms to decidedly modern topics (Elvis Presley, leather-clad bikers). His tone of voice combined Cambridge refinement and erudition with a held-in masculinity derived from American movies. However, as the 1950s and 1960s progressed and Gunn moved to San Francisco to live with his American lover, he discovered a more flexible technique to accompany his newly relaxed California lifestyle. Gunn adopted a syllabic line that owed much to the American models of William Carlos Williams and Yvor Winters and associated the consequent lightening of tone with his own coming out as a gay man. The later collections were all openly and relaxedly gay.

The elegiac tradition of earlier centuries offered a ready template for consolatory lamentation when the AIDS epidemic affected gay men in Western cities in the 1980s. In the face of intense hostility from the political classes and the mainstream media, gay men sought understanding voices within their own suffering communities and were answered in the United States by poets such as Thom Gunn and more recently Mark Doty and Rafael Campo. What was distinctive about such writers was their ability to turn personal involvement in the epidemic and personal grief into a reaffirmation of the highest principles of gay liberation, akin to the amor vincit omnia (love conquers all) of the ancients.

One of the most common themes in contemporary gay fiction is the family, that is, the families from which young gay individuals emerge, the families that closeted individuals construct by marrying and having children, and the alternative families that "liberated" individuals develop out of new social circumstances. Informed by the feminist critique of the coercive nuclear family as well as by conservative retrenchments claiming the nuclear family as the only socially and morally responsible mode of living, gay novelists have tried to show how oppressive and harmful the heterosexual family structure can become and how protective and nurturing different structures, imaginatively constructed according to the needs of individuals, can be if the concept of the family is allowed to expand and develop flexibly, encompassing fresh sexual and affectional arrangements. Major late-twentieth-century gay novelists included Alan Hollinghurst and Patrick Gale in Great Britain, Edmund White and Andrew Holleran in the United States, and Yves Navarre and Dominique Fernandez in France.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bredbeck, Gregory W. 1991. Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Frantzen, Allen J. 1998. Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hammond, Paul. 1996. Love between Men in English Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Lilly, Mark. 1993. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press.

Martin, Robert K. 1979. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Robinson, Christopher. 1995. Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature. London and New York: Cassell.

Smith, Bruce R. 1991. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Summers, Claude J. 1990. Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum.

Summers, Claude J., ed. 1995. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present. New York: H. Holt.

Woods, Gregory. 1987. Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Woods, Gregory. 1998. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

                                              Gregory Woods

V. LESBIAN, CREATIVE

Since the emergence of lesbian and gay studies in the Euro-American academy, literary scholars have struggled with the question of definition, trying to answer the question of what counts as a lesbian text. Should the author be a self-defined lesbian, or is it enough that a number of readers have taken a text to be a lesbian one? Can male authors writing about female same-sex desire be legitimately included in the domain of lesbian literature? And what if self-proclaimed lesbian authors choose not to write about lesbian themes—should such texts still be included in a lesbian literary history? These questions have been answered in different ways, leading to different demarcations of the field and different processes of canonization.

TRACING SAPPHO

Female same-sex desire has figured in Western literary history since the ancient Greek poet Sappho of the isle of Lesbos (fl. c. 610–c. 580 bce) penned the passionate lines that would associate her name and place of origin with women's love for women to this very day. The increasing availability of literary texts with explicitly lesbian characters and themes, written by openly lesbian novelists and poets, in the final decades of the twentieth century, issued, somewhat paradoxically, in a narrower critical scope than would appear to be warranted by the continuing significance of this mythical predecessor. As a result, a dominant approach in late twentieth-century literary historiography has been to see the process of lesbian canonization as one of excavation, of rediscovering a tradition of creative writing that has been obscured or repressed by and within an overwhelmingly heterosexist and lesbophobic mainstream culture. Obviously, there have been periods in which moral and social codes have prevented writers, male and female, from explicitly naming the object of their fascination and literary imagination. This is not to say, however, that there have not been more covert ways of giving expression to the love that reputedly dare not speak its name, or to represent characters and develop narrative strategies that render lesbianism textually present.

The first pioneering attempts at mapping out a history of lesbian literature in the second half of the twentieth century—most notably the classic bibliography Sex Variant Women in Literature, first published by Jeannette Howard Foster (1895–1981) in 1956 at her own expense—as well as later literary historiographers, such as Lillian Faderman, in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981), and Terry Castle, in her monumental The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003), adopt a much more inclusive perspective on what counts as lesbian literature than the hidden from history approach that, mainly for sound political reasons, prevailed in the latter decades of the twentieth century. If, however, the need for social recognition is provisionally left aside, so that the notion of lesbian literature is allowed to encompass a much wider range of writings than those authored by self-declared lesbians, the putatively forbidden topic turns out to have had a much richer and much more varied existence in the world of Euro-American letters than the idea of lesbian invisibility might suggest.

Crossing both generic and national boundaries, literary expressions, representations, and configurations of female same-sex desire appear in various guises in Euro-American literature from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Recurring patterns of imagery and a number of persistently returning telltale scenes jointly combine into landscape in which lesbianism as a theme—as a site of the cultural imagination—could grow into a full-fledged literary topos. Rather than merely reflecting changing social perceptions of female same-sex desire, such elaborations have, as Castle points out, played a considerable role in furthering the development of the lesbian idea, that is to say, in making the possibility of female same-sex eroticism not only thinkable but also practically available to a general audience.

There is little evidence to suggest that, before the recovery of Sappho's poetry in the late Renaissance, there was much cultural awareness that women might desire women. Although Sappho's work endured well into Roman times, inspiring such authors of antiquity as Ovid, Martial, Lucian, and—famously—Gaius Valerius Catullus, the near obliteration of her work during the reign of the Roman Christian and Byzantine churches rendered the notion of what later would be called sapphism culturally unavailable for almost ten centuries. The rediscovery of ancient texts and learning, and their incorporation into European art and science at the end of the Middle Ages, also (re)introduced the conceptual possibility of female same-sex desire into the Euro-Western cultural imagination. Because Renaissance poets, from Petrarch (1304–1374) and Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), through Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1584) and Louise Labé (c. 1524–1566), to Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) and John Donne (1572–1631), found a source of inspiration in the gradually rediscovered lyrics of the muse of Lesbos, Sappho and the form of love to which her legendary reputation has subsequently given its name was firmly planted in the Euro-Western collective consciousness by the end of the sixteenth century. Whether maligned or revered, dismissed or embraced, the Sappho legend continued to be explored by poets and novelists well into the twentieth century. She figures directly, for instance, in Alexander Pope's Sappho to Phaon (1712), Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807), Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (1857), A. C. Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon (posthumously published after the author's death in 1909) Paul Verlaine's Scènes d'amour saphique (1870; first published as Les Amies [1867]), the pseudonymous Pierre Louÿs's Les chansons de Bilitis (1894; real name, Pierre Louis), Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women (1928), Colette's The Pure and the Impure (1933), and Marguerite Yourcenar's Sappho; ou, Le suicide (1937). Sappho also frequently surfaces in the poems of Natalie Barney (1876–1972), the pseudonymous Renée Vivien (1877–1909; real name, Pauline Tarn), Amy Lowell (1874–1925), H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886–1961), and numerous others.

TOPOI OF LESBIAN DESIRE

Generating one of the more enduring literary topoi in which lesbian desire is likely to prosper, the significance of Sappho's native island Lesbos, where she was assumed to have initiated young girls into much more than what later ages would consider proper female accomplishments, reverberates in the secluded setting of an all-female environment in which a great many stories and novels of lesbian desire from the sixteenth century onward evolve. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, such a space is usually a convent or a nunnery—there were, at that time, very few other places where women could live in complete separation from men. Male writers of the period tended to satirize such spaces, presenting them as morally unhealthy and corrupting, such as Andrew Marvell in "Upon Appleton House" (1650). Others, while whetting their pornographic appetites, presented them in lurid terms as the breeding grounds of perverse female desires, as suggested by Denis Diderot's lewd novel The Nun (written 1760, published 1796).

The fascination with the erotic possibilities opened up by an all-female environment extends into nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, especially in stories and novels written by women, in which, reflecting the changing social contexts, the convent or nunnery is usually replaced by a girls' school or women's college. Starting with Sarah Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall (1762) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), and through Colette's Claudine à l'école (1900), the pseudonymous Clemence Dane's A Regiment of Women (1917; real name, Winifred Ashton), Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (1933), a novel based on the more famous film, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), for which Winsloe also wrote the script, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Brigid Brophy's The Finishing Touch (1963), and Violette Leduc's Thérèse et Isabelle (1966), the secluded, safe space of the girls' school has continued to offer imaginative possibilities for literary lesbianism.

Such possibilities, however, primarily arise from the fundamental restrictions this literary topos implies: not only is the all-female environment quite literally cut off from the "real" world of heterosexual relations, the same-sex passions and desires—whether for admired teachers or for fellow pupils—flaring up within its seclusion, also remain confined to the protagonists' pre-adulthood, and can thus be conveniently reduced to adolescent crushes. What is more, these passionate affairs must necessarily end when the girls finish their education and leave school. Still, as an enabling space, the all-female environment—whether in its earlier form of a girls' school or women's college, or in one of its later permutations, such as a hotel, a female prison, a summer camp, a sport's team, or commune, has also given rise to another recurring configuration, that is, the combination of an older woman and a young girl entertaining—usually quite explosive, or destructive—amorous relations, as in Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel (1927), Naomi Royde-Smith's The Tortoiseshell Cat (1925), Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927), Dorothy Strachey's Olivia (1949; married name, Bussy), and Harriett Gilbert's The Riding Mistress (1983).

CROSS-DRESSING, MEDICAL MODELS, AND THE LESBIAN VAMPIRE

Another figuration in which female same-sex desire has traditionally found expression is that of mistaken (gender) identity or cross-dressing. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) may well lay claim to the most delightful early renderings of the erotic possibilities generated by such (deliberate) gender confusion, as, for instance, in Twelfth Night (1601), while later male authors have often taken up this theme to expose the monstrous or degenerative aspects of women who impersonate men, or appropriate male (nuptial) privileges. Examples here include Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746) through Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God (1930). Female authors of the early twentieth century, largely under the influence of the new sexological accounts of homosexuality that explained women's desire for women as the result of gender inversion, tended to explore the more tragic aspects of the lesbian's terrible fate, most notoriously represented by Radclyffe Hall's tormented heroine Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (1928). Butch/femme culture of the 1950s and early 1960s can be argued to extend both the erotically titillating possibilities of cross-dressing, and to have absorbed the pathologizing aspects of sexological and psychological discourses. The self-torture and psychic confusion of many butch protagonists, as, for instance, in Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker series (1962) and Maureen Duffy's The Microcosm (1966), show that, by the mid-twentieth century, the latter appears to have won out over the former in the cultural imagination. In contrast, a series of novels featuring the figure of the tomboy (Carson McCuller's Frankie, for instance, in The Member of the Wedding [1946] or Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird [1960]) can be placed in the more lighthearted, Shakespearean tradition, even if these works also partake in the (Freudian) idea of female same-sex desire as an adolescent, hence passing phenomenon.

The pathological notion of female same-sex desire prevailing in the first half of the twentieth century, and the literary depiction of lesbians as freaks of nature, can be linked to the earlier association of love between women with the monstrous or the supernatural, or to that nineteenth-century invention, the lesbian vampire. From its inception, the vampire in art and literature, falling outside the bounds of nature as much as it is excluded from polite society, has consistently been linked with homosexuality. With predecessors in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel" (1816) and in Sheridan Le Fanu's gothic story Carmilla (1872), contemporary authors have, however, succeeded at once in exploiting and perverting this tradition by presenting lesbian vampires as enabling female figures whose unnatural powers are often wielded in attempts to overthrow patriarchal society. Whereas Zoë Fairbairns, in Benefits (1979), and Sally Gearheart, in The Wanderground (1978), primarily use the transgressive sexual and gender potential of their bloodsucking heroines, Ellen Galford additionally oversteps religious boundaries by making her undead heroine in The Dyke and the Dybbuk (1994) Jewish, while Jewelle Gomez, in The Gilda Stories (1991), takes the transgressive aspect another step further by presenting her readers with a black lesbian vampire.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEFORE STONEWALL

Although the appearance of a black lesbian is no longer so remarkable in late-twentieth-century literature, there are relatively few literary texts predating the civil rights movement and the Stonewall riots (1969) that focus on the intersection of racial difference and female same-sex desire. This is all the more remarkable, because, from the emergence of modern science in the eighteenth century onward, all forms of sexual degeneration, including lesbianism, have been associated with racial difference, savagery, and primitivism. Still, even during 1920s and 1930s, when African-American culture generally flourished—a period known as the Harlem Renaissance—lesbian self-expression occurred only in highly coded fashion. Exemplary are the writings of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the love poems of Angelina Weld Grimké (suppressed by the author herself, and rediscovered only in the 1980s), Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), and the lyrics of the bisexual blues singers Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters. Jane Bowles's novel Two Serious Ladies (1943) offers one of the first explorations of a white woman's desire for a brown prostitute. It is only in the 1970s, with writers such as Audre Lorde (From a Land Where Other People Live [1973]), Ann Allen Shockley (Loving Her [1974]), and Pat Parker (Movement in Black [1978]), that a tradition of African-American lesbian writing begins to take off. While increasingly politically motivated, most of such literary representations emphasize the strength and endurance of friendship and love among black lesbians faced with the overall racism of white society as well as the homophobia in black communities, as, for instance, in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), and Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982).

Lesbian writers on both sides of the Atlantic began to use a variety of traditional literary genres, as well as develop new ones, to give overt expression to their feelings, preoccupations, and outlooks on life and society. Earlier in the twentieth century, few had followed Radclyffe Hall in thematizing their sexual love for women, preferring to couch such concerns in modernist experimenting or behind sociocultural critiques, as in the works of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), or to enfold it in a fantasy figure such as Virginia Woolf's ageless, intermediately sexed Orlando, the eponymous hero/ine of her comic romp of 1928, believed to be a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was having an affair at the time. Stein's openly lesbian text Lifting Belly (1953) was not published until after her death, the same fate as was suffered by H.D.'s novel Paint It Today, which did not appear in print until 1992. What the novels, poems, and short stories of the early decades of the twentieth century often quite liberally do depict, however, are strong bonds between women, often tinged with eroticism, echoing what in earlier centuries had been called romantic friendships.

Dorothy Miller Richardson's Dawn's Left Hand (1931) explores the close interrelations between intense female friendship and homoerotic passion. Sylvia Town-send Warner's novel Summer Will Show (1936) equally concentrates on the erotic bond between its two female protagonists, albeit in a story displaced into the nineteenth century. Most of the early novels of Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1972), and quite a number of her short stories, feature women developing passionate relationships with each other. Though not offering a particularly pleasant portrait, Mary McCarthy's inclusion of a lesbian character in her best-selling novel The Group (1963) suggests that, in the early 1960s, lesbianism was becoming an acceptable topic in North American literary writing. The British novelist Brigid Brophy's In Transit(1969) therefore quite literally marks a moment of transition, not only because its protagonist has no determinate gender, and the text offers its readers a distinctly eroticized bi-textuality, but also because it represents a moment of transition between the occluded, indirect, or ambivalent representation of female same-sex desire in literature before Stonewall, and the outspoken, sometimes defiant, and often celebratory expressions of lesbianism in the literature since then.

AFTER STONEWALL: GENERIC AND STYLISTIC DIVERSITY

The genre of the picaresque, with its lone hero fighting against the world, proved particularly fruitful in the politicized early days of gay and lesbian liberation. In sharp contrast to the rather quiet, reflective novels of the early 1960s, such as May Sarton's The Small Room (1961), Jane Rule's The Desert of the Heart (1964), and Isabel Miller's A Place for Us (1969; reissued as Patience and Sarah, 1973), the quintessential lesbian hero of the early 1970s was Rita Mae Brown's feisty and outrageous Molly Bolt, protagonist of her semi-autobiographical coming-out story Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Whereas Elana Nachman's Riverfinger Women (1974) similarly revolves around a picaresque lesbian hero, Monique Wittig, on a rather grim note, presents the main characters of her Les guérillères (1969) as social warriors, expressing the elation and rage of many lesbians fighting at the barricades against the oppressions of the heteropatriarchal system. Some Stonewall writers took up the Sapphic tradition by imaginatively exploring the possibilities—and problems—of all-female societies, including June Arnold in The Cook and the Carpenter (1973), Gearheart in The Wanderground, or, in a more utopian vein, Joanna Russ in The Female Man (1975).

Where older lesbian poets, such as May Swenson (1919–1989), Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), and Sarton (1912–1995), still tended to avoid overtly lesbian subjects, the new generation of poets showed no such qualms. With Audre Lorde (1934–1992) and Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) as two of the most articulate voices of the period, the 1970s gave rise to an astonishingly rich tradition of explicitly lesbian poetry, especially in the United States. Much lesbian poetry first appeared in such newly founded women's journals as Heresies, Conditions, Sinister Wisdom, and off our backs, but many also succeeded in getting their work published as books, including Olga Broumas's Beginning with O (1977), Judy Grahn's Edward the Dyke (1971), Lorde's From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), Pat Parker's Child of Myself (1971), June Jordan's Pit Stop (1973), and Rich's The Dream of a Common Language (1978).

As suggested, few African-American writers, with Shockley's novel Loving Her a rare and important exception, explored lesbian issues before the 1980s. Lorde published her autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in 1982. The landmark publication, one that opened up the literary field to lesbians from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds, was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Inspired by the then prevailing emphasis on the politics of difference, this anthology of essays, fiction, and poetry gave eloquent voice to the frustrations and anger experienced by all lesbians of color within the overwhelmingly white (lesbian) feminist movement. Anzaldúa later published the influential prose poem Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Paula Gunn Allen is one of few lesbians writing from a Native American perspective (The Woman Who Owned the Shadows [1983]), while Willyce Kim is probably the best-known Asian-American lesbian novelist, and Michelle Cliff explores the racism of Jamaican society in her novels Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987).

Prose genres that proved particularly amenable to lesbian appropriation include such forms of formula fiction as romance, mystery, and detective novels. Growing out of the 1970s coming-out stories, the lesbian romance became one of the most popular genres of the 1980s, with representatives such as Doris Grumbach's Chamber Music (1979), Nancy Toder's Choices (1980), and Katherine V. Forrest's Curious Wine (1983). Among the spate of lesbian detective novels by, among others, Camarin Grae, Claire McNab, Barbara Wilson (later known as Barbara Sjoholm), and Vicki McConnell, those by Sarah Schulman (The Sophie Horowitz Story [1984]) and Mary Wings (She Came Too Late [1987]) stand out by being less formulaic, and, stylistically as well as thematically, more inventive than many of their contemporaries.

Schulman's later prose style shows the influence of postmodernism, but her stories also move beyond the strict political and cultural constraints of mere lesbian expectancy, complicating the sexual lives of her protagonists with issues of ethnicity and social economics. Another lesbian writer who presents a wider vision of contemporary society than even her best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)—adapted for BBC television in 1990—might have suggested, is the British author Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959). Like some of her North American counterparts, such as Bertha Harris (Lover (1976) and Carole Maso (Ghost Dance [1986]), Winterson has succeeded in reaching mainstream audiences, by developing what might be called the postmodern lesbian novel of ideas, especially through her later works, The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry(1989), The PowerBook (2000), and Lighthousekeeping (2004). Other important novelists of the 1990s include Jenifer Levin (The Sea of Light [1993]), Paula Martinac (Home Movies [1993]), and Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina [1992]), whose novels engage lesbian characters, but whose main focus is on social issues such as death, AIDS, and poverty.

One of the most successful genres that continues to thrive, and one equally finding its origins in the 1980s, is what might loosely be called lesbian erotica, especially in its S/M variety. Pat Califia (Macho Sluts [1988]), Robbi Sommers (Kiss and Tell [1991]), and Tee Corinne (Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex [1987]) were the forerunners in a tradition that as of 2006 makes up most of the titles produced by a quick search for lesbian literature at the online bookseller Amazon.com. If this suggests that lesbian literature has, since the early sixteenth century, developed from a relatively obscure, often submerged, and frequently maligned form of cultural expression, into a fully commercially viable enterprise, there are also quite a number of lesbian authors who have made it into the mainstream through somewhat different channels. Especially in the United Kingdom, there are highly respected and successful novelists whose focus on lesbian subject matter has in no way prevented them from gaining widespread general recognition. With prize-winning novels such as Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2004)—the latter short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 and winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award—the novelist Ali Smith finds her match not only in Winterson, who has continued to keep up her reputation as one of Britain's most successful lesbian novelists with Weight (2005) and Tanglewreck (2006), but also in the best-selling Sarah Waters, whose debut Tipping the Velvet (1999) and Fingersmith (2002)—short-listed for the Man Booker Prize—were both adapted for television by the BBC, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Waters's next novel, The Night Watch (2006), again features lesbian characters, this time against the setting of World War II. The increasingly widespread cultural resonance of such writings only goes to show that the lesbian novel continues to be redefined—the ultimate results of which are as yet unknown, but can definitely be awaited with great anticipation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castle, Terry. 1993. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Castle, Terry, ed. 2003. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow.

Foster, Jeannette H. 1985 (1956). Sex Variant Women in Literature. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press.

Grier, Barbara. 1981. The Lesbian in Literature. 3rd edition. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press.

Hobby, Elaine, and Chris White, eds. 1991. What Lesbians Do in Books. London: Women's Press.

Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, ed. 1990. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press.

Stimpson, Catharine R. 1981. "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English." Critical Inquiry 8(2): 363-379.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. 1990. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon Press.

                                         renée c. hoogland