University of California Press, 1990
“Sedgwick’s brilliant Epistemology of the Closet will have many lives: as a work of literary criticism, a cultural study, a political analysis; as a text for gay and straight, academic and non-academic readers, and potentially as a landmark in the development of gay and lesbian studies.” –Julie Abraham, Women’s Review of Books
“Despite all of the talk current now about how ‘engaged’ or ‘activist’ literary criticism, no book I have recently read is as successful as Sedgwick’s in making provocative connections between literary acts and social dynamics. –Mark Edmundson, The Nation
Contents
Acknowledgements
Credits
Introduction: Axiomatic
1. Epistemology of the Closet
2. Some Binarisms (I)
Billy Budd: After the Homosexual
3. Some Binarisms (II)
Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body
4. The Beast in the Closet
James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic
5. Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet
Index