Literary Modernism and the Production of the Twentieth Century Homosexual Novel

Abstract

This thesis takes as its subject the relationship between modernist forms of novel writing and notions of a homosexual sensibility. In other words, this project is interested in the material conditions and development of writing by and about homosexuals in the modernist period. It tracks the categorisation of homosexual identities that have run parallel to the onset of modernism and their incorporation into literary works. I discuss the restrictions placed on homosexual writers in publishing openly, considering the radical publishing ventures which laid the groundwork for homosexual liberation throughout the twentieth century. This thesis aims not only to present an account of the conditions in which gay writing was formulated but hopes to shed new light on the taxonomy of the homosexual novel. It locates sites of rupture towards the liberation of sexuality and extrapolates them to understand the extent to which both modernist and postmodern writers and publishing networks played in this liberation. Examining novels from the fin de siècle through to 1965, this thesis considers how several modernist and postmodern writers – among them, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Jean Genet, and William S. Burroughs – were instrumental in building the movement that would ultimately free the constraints placed on sexually explicit and homosexually erotic art. I argue that the liberation of the homosexual novel was a process enacted primarily between the publishing and artistic networks of three cities – London, Paris and New York – with the geography of the homosexual novel being crucial in the fight for its eventual acceptance. This project thus follows the movement of writers between these cities as the changing nature of obscenity laws required, with the chapters of this thesis mirroring the spacial movement of homosexual artistic production during the twentieth century.