The seminar covers a wide range of same-sex writing in twentieth-century Anglophone literature. Beginning with an exploration of Modernist literature, the course will first focus on the impact of late-Victorian sexologists on early 20th-century understandings of sexual identity. Other key moments to be addressed in class include comradeship in the First World War, the liberating social changes of the queer Sixties and the AIDS crisis of the 1980ies and 1990ies. Above and beyond this historical overview, the seminar will discuss some of the central aspects that have lastingly characterised representations of gay and lesbian as well as queer culture throughout the last century, among them drag and camp.

PRIMARY TEXTS (MANDATORY READING)
Forster, E.M. Maurice. 1971. London: Penguin, 2005. Print.
Walter, George, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. [selected poems by Wilfred Owen et al.]
Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. 1928. London: Penguin, 2015. Print.
Orton, Joe. What the Butler Saw. London et al.: Bloomsbury, 1969. Print. [or any other edition]
Mars-Jones, Adam. Monopolies of Loss. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Print. [selected short stories]
Kay, Jackie Trumpet. 1998. London: Picador, 2016. Print.