A
History of Gay Literature : The Male Tradition by Gregory
Woods
The "male tradition" that British
scholar and poet Gregory Woods identifies in A History of Gay
Literature is perhaps most notable for its breadth.
Appearances are made by all the authors one might expect--Plato,
Marcel
Proust, Oscar
Wilde, Christopher
Isherwood, and so on--but Woods makes a substantial effort to
do more than replicate the standard "gay canon" that has
been iterated ad infinitum.
Woods reminds readers who have placed all their
faith in gay literature upon "literary fiction" that
gayness has been expressed more in verse than in prose and by
"lowbrow" authors such as Clive
Barker. By giving prominent attention to non-Western authors
and to representations of homosexuality by authors who were not
gay or bisexual males, he convincingly elevates gay literature
from the products of a marginal subculture to an international
body of work intimately connected to the literary mainstream.
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.
