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

by Lillian Faderman (Editor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $7.90

  This is a literary anthology with each piece set in an historical and literary context that seeks to redefine four centuries of lesbian writing. From the verse of Sappho in 600BC to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness published in 1928, there is little women's writing that is recognised as lesbian . A review of the shifting concept of lesbian literature is offered, followed by examples of six different genres - Romantic Friendship, Sexual Inversion, Exotic Inversion, Exotic and Evil Lesbians, Lesbian Encoding, Lesbian Feminism and Post-Lesbian Feminism. Works as diverse as Willa Cather's My Antonia and Virginia Woolf's Orlando , poetry by Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell, fiction by Carson McCullers, Helen Hulll and Alice Walker are examined here. In addition, writing by men who focused on women's relationship is included. This is Faderman's own personal search for a definition of lesbian literature.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $12.17

  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.