Colleen Lamos

Deviant Modernism: Sexual and textual errancy in T S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust


Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pit Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom    http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA    http://www.cup.org
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

Copyright © Colleen Lamos 1998

First published 1998

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge



The book description from page i:

This original study re-evaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. According to modern cultural discourses and psychosexual categorizations, these deviant desires and identifications feminize men or tend to render them homosexual. Colleen Lamos's analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. She argues that canonical male modernism, far from being a monolithic entity with a coherently conservative political agenda, is in fact the site of errant impulses and unresolved struggles. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole and a recognition of the heterogeneous forces that formed and deformed modernism.

Colleen Lamos is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rice University in Texas and has taught at the Ohio State University and the University of Saarland in Germany: She has published widely on fiction, modernism, and gender studies in journals and edited collections of essays, and is co-editor of a special issue of the European Joyce Studies Annual on "Joycean Masculinities."




A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lamos, Colleen.
Deviant modernism: sexual and textual errancy in T S. Eliot, James Joyce, and
Marcel Proust
/ Colleen Lamos
p.  cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-62418-5
I. Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965--Criticism and
interpretation.    2. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du
temps perdu.    3. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses.    4. Sexual
deviation in literature.    5. Gender identity in literature.
6. Masculinity in literature.    7. Modernism (Literature)    8. Sex in
literature.    9. Men in literature.    I. Title
PS3509.L43Z69174     1998
820.9'353--dc21     98-16594 CIP

ISBN 0-521-62418-5



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