Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature

Arguing for renewed attention to covert same-sex-oriented writing (and to authorial intention more generally), this study explores the representation of female and male homosexuality in late sixteenth- through mid-eighteenth-century British and French literature. The author also uncovers and analyzes long-term continuities in the representation of same-sex love, sex, and desire between the classical, early modern, eighteenth-century, and even modern periods. Among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors and texts examined here are "Mme de Murat", "Les Memoires De Madame La Comtesse De M***" (1697); John Cleland, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" (1748-49); Tobias Smollett, "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (1748); Nicolas Chorier and Jean Nicolas, "L'Academie des dames" (1680); Delarivier Manley, "The New Atalantis" (1709); and Isaac de Benserade, "Iphis et lante" (1637). Classical texts brought into the discussion include Juvenal's "Satires"; Lucian's "Erotes"; and, most importantly, Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Casting its net broadly yet exploring deeply-poems, plays, novels, and more; from the serious to the satiric, the polite to the pornographic; well-known and little-known; written in English, French, and Latin; published in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and France; plus key classical texts - this study engages with the historiography of sexuality as a whole.