LITMIR.BIZ

"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the nineteenth century—the century when, it has been said, sexuality as such (and various taxonomized sexual identities) were invented—is the period when American short stories were invented, and when they were the queerest."—Christopher Looby, from the Introduction A man in small-town America wears the clothing of his wife and sisters; satisfied at last that he has «a perfect suit of garments appropriate for my sex,» he commits suicide, asking only that he be buried dressed as a woman. A country maid has a passionate summer relationship with an heiress, the memory of which sustains her for the next forty years. A girl is carried by a strong wind to a place where she discovers that everything is made of candy, including the «queer people,» whom she licks and eats. If these are not the kinds of stories we expect to find in nineteenth-century American literature, it is perhaps because we have been looking in the wrong places. The stories gathered here are written by a diverse assortment of writers—women and men, obscure and famous: Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Louisa May Alcott, among others. Exploring the vagaries of gender identity, erotic desire, and affectional attachments that do not map easily onto present categories of sex and gender, they celebrate, mourn, and question the different modes of embodiment and forgotten styles of pleasure of nineteenth-century America.

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"Heterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor substitute for passionate love between men—and heterosexuality's historical emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments, a grave misfortune."—Christopher Looby, from the Introduction Freshly returned to New York City from his studies abroad, unmoored by news of the apparent suicide of his accomplished childhood friend Clara Denman, and drawn in spite of himself toward the sinister man-about-town Densdeth, Robert Byng is unsettlingly adrift in the city of his birth. Things take an even stranger turn once he finds lodgings in the Gothic halls of Chrysalis College in lower Manhattan. There he meets the mysteriously reclusive Cecil Dreeme, brilliant artist and creature of the night. In Dreeme, Byng finds a friend unlike any he has known before. But is Cecil the man he claims to be, and can their friendship survive the dangers they will soon face together? Issued posthumously in 1861, Cecil Dreeme was the first published novel of Theodore Winthrop, who has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first Union officers killed in the line of duty during the Civil War. Newly edited by Christopher Looby, it is a very queer book indeed.

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