| Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences. Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language. Natasha Hurley is associate professor of English at the University of Alberta and coeditor, with Steven Bruhm, of Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minnesota, 2004).
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