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The Homophobic Academy

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Abstract

In the Introduction, in explaining in general terms why there is a need for gay studies, I promised to discuss in detail what mainstream critical practice amounted to over issues of homosexuality in literature, so that the move towards a different approach would be understood. I propose to do that now. I shall discuss the issues of censorship, marginalisation, abuse and critical assumptions in modern literary studies, and conclude with an extended example of homophobic writing in the work of Jeffrey Meyers.

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Notes

  1. Ian Ousby (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ) p. 114.

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  2. David Rees, The Milkman’s On His Way ( London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982 ).

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  3. John Osborne, review in Bête Noir no. 1 (Autumn 1984) p. 101.

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  4. See, for example, Literary Theory: An Introduction ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1983 ).

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  5. Andrew Field, Nabokov. His Life in Part ( London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977 ) p. 48.

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  6. Paul Zweig, The Making of the Poet ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 ).

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  7. Quoted in Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987 ) p. 138.

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  8. Tom Marshall, The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence ( London: Heinemann, 1970 ) p. 128.

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  9. John Logan, Hart Crane: ‘White Buildings’ (New York: Liveright, 1972) p. xxxi.

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  10. J. Unterecker, Voyager. A Life of Hart Crane ( London: Blond, 1970 ) p. 378.

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  11. S. Hazo, Hart Crane: An Introduction and Interpretation ( New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963 ) p. 56.

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  12. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Realist (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1953) pp. 19, 20.

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  13. Betty Frieden, The Feminine Mystique (1963; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 ) pp. 239–40.

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  14. R. W. B. Lewis, The Poetry of Hart Crane. A Critical Study ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967 ) p. 196.

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  15. Valerie Minogue, Proust: ‘Du Côté de chez Swann’ ( Arnold: London, 1973 ) p. 14.

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  16. From Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann and his Family quoted in a review by Desmond Christy, Guardian 18 August 1989.

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  17. Phillip Knightley, ‘T. E. Lawrence’, in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), The Craft of Literary Biography ( London: Macmillan, 1985 ) p. 164.

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  18. Jeffrey Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature, 1890–1930 ( London: Athlone Press, 1977 ).

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  19. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987)’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 88 (1989) pp. 126–9.

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  20. Oliver Bernard, Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. xxx.

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© 1993 Mark Lilly

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Lilly, M. (1993). The Homophobic Academy. In: Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22966-6_1

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