"Considers the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gertrude Stein, and Elizabeth Bishop to locate a queer aesthetic of the ordinary in literary modernism, challenging the notion that queerness and ordinariness are incompatible or antagonistic"-- Provided by publisher.
The first book to examine a queer aesthetic of the ordinary in literary modernism, challenging the notion that queerness and ordinariness are incompatible or antagonistic.
Can queer life be ordinary? By answering yes, Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism prompts queer studies to consider what it has long devalued and neglected: the ordinary lives queer people create. Declining to cede the ordinary to queer studies critique of the normal, Jess Shollenberger argues for and models a reading practice that is attuned to queer desires, figures, and intimacies arrayed against the normal yet enabled by ordinary life. By tracing the representation of queerness in modernist literature as presence, possibility, and insistence, Shollenberger illuminates how the modernist interest in ordinary life cannot be understood apart from queer experience, culture, and aesthetics. Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism disturbs queer studies by turning toward the ordinary as an object for queer inquiry and by reading perversely without the dominant hermeneutic for queer literary studiesthe closet. Across interpretations of work by Sarah Orne Jewett, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop, Shollenberger develops the practice of reading modernist writing without the closet, expanding the scope of modernist studies and augmenting our knowledge of queerness for a shifting, unstable present.
