Chloe Plus Olivia: Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

by Lillian Faderman (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $20.21

  This text explores lesbian sensibility in 20th century fiction. From the verse of Sappho in 600 BC to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness , published in 1928, there is little women's writing that is recognised as lesbian . It is short because while romantic friendship between women was an accepted social institution from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and sex between women appears to have been a staple of pornography since the incarnation of that genre, the possibility of seeing oneself as a lesbian had to wait until the emergence of English sexologists in the last decades of the 19th century, who defined lesbianism as a social and sexual category. If by lesbian literature we mean work in which the subject of lesbianism is the centre, the history is even shorter. Is there a lesbian sensibility that can be identified in literature that may not be concerned specifically with lesbian sexuality? Examining works as diverse as Willa Cather's My Antonia , the poetry of Gertrude Stein, the fiction of Carson McCullers, and the lesbian heroine in the novels of Margaret Atwood, the author seeks to redefine the canon.