Thirtieth anniversary edition. Foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum. Columbia University Press, 2016
“For all the power of Sedgwick’s paradigms, and for all her finesse as a theoretician, her greatest gift was language itself, which she worked like a baroque, recalcitrant instrument, a bellows she forced to make unaccustomed sounds, pushing critical idioms (the received postures of literary-critical academic writing) into unfamiliar torsions.” –From the foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum
CONTENTS
Foreword: The Eve Effect, by Wayne Koestenbaum
Preface to the 1993 Edition
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