Columbia University Press, 1985
“Sedgwick offers us dazzling illumination of how, in a homophobic world where homosocial desire bonds men together, their desire for each other must be manifested across the body of the woman they both claim to love. We learn what are the dynamics when two men love one woman, a triangle that occurs with surprising frequency in our literature. Clever, shocking, and probably irrefutable, Between Men is wonderfully readable.” –Carolyn G. Heilbrun
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
i. Homosocial Desire
ii. Sexual Politics and Sexual Meaning
iii. Sex or History?
iv. What This Book Does
1. Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles
2. Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
3. The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial Desire
4. A Sentimental Journey: Sexualism and the Citizen of the World
5. Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic
6. Murder Incorporated: Confessions of a Justified Sinner
7. Tennyson’s Princess: One Bride for Seven Brothers
8. Adam Bede and Henry Esmond: Homosocial Desire and the Historicity of the Female
9. Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend
10. Up the Postern Stair: Edwin Drood and the Homophobia of Empire
Coda: Toward the Twentieth Century: English Readers of Whitman
Notes
Bibliography
Index