A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods

This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures, languages, and centuries. A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion.

While many books have been written about gay writing, this is the first full-scale account of male gay literature, across cultures, languages, and from ancient times to the present. Working within the widest definitions of what constitutes gay literature, it includes chapters on the significant periods of cultural history (the Greek and Roman civilisations, the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, the American major writers (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Proust) and on common themes (boyhood, mourning, masturbation).

A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it covers a definitive history of a tradition, it covers a massive field in terms of time (from Homer to Edmund White), literary status (from cultural icons like Virgil and Dante to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett), and location (from Mishima's Tokyo and Abu Nuwas' Baghdad to David Leavitt's New York).

Taking a deliberately controversial view, A History of Gay Literature also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men. It addresses conspicuous gaps, such as the lack of a substantial literature of the gay holocaust and the dearth of gay writing in postcolonial African poetry. In the sheer breadth of its scope, the book confronts recent trends in Anglo-American gay studies, both by insisting on the internationalism of homosexual culture and by reasserting a continuity of homo-erotic traditions between the ancient world and the present.

Furthermore, by declining to focus only on the most obvious authors and texts, Woods succeeds in both widening the gay canon and reminding us of the large variety of gay works within the mainstream. What emerges is a gay male literature that is far from peripheral to the world's major cultural traditions.

"Woods' own artistry is evident throughout this elegant and startling book ... These finely honed gay readings of selected Western (and some Eastern) literary texts richly reward the careful attention they demand ... Though grounded in the particulars of gay male identity, this masterpiece of literary (and social) criticism calls across the divides of sex and sexual orientation."-Kirkus Reviews

"An encyclopedic mapping of the intersection between male homosexuality and belles lettres ... [that is] good reading, in part because Woods has foregone strict chronology to link writers across eras and cultures."-Louis Bayard, Washington Post

"Encyclopedic and critical, evenhanded and interpretive, Woods has produced a study that stands as a monument to the progress of gay literary criticism. No one to date has attempted such a grand world-wide history ... It cannot be recommended highly enough."-Library Journal

Paperback / 468 pages