| Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America Subjects: Isherwood Christopher 1904–1986 -- Criticism and interpretation; Homosexuality in literature; Gay culture in literature; Homosexuality and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th;
Drawing extensively on Isherwood's archives, including manuscript drafts and unpublished correspondence with readers, publishers, and other writers, Middlebrow Queer demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed gay content for heterosexual readers in his postwar novels while also covertly writing for gay audiences and encouraging a symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. The result--in such novels as The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River --was a complex, layered form of writing that Harker calls "middlebrow camp," a mode that extended the boundaries of both gay and middlebrow fiction. Weaving together biography, history, and literary criticism, Middlebrow Queer traces the continuous evolution of Isherwood's simultaneously queer and American postwar authorial identity. In doing so, the book illuminates many aspects of Cold War America's gay print cultures, from gay protest novels to "out" pulp fiction.
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