Nameless Offences
Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century
Nameless Offences
Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century
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Description
What did the Victorians know about desire between men? Was it really 'the love that dare not speak its name'? "Nameless Offences" argues that even before Oscar Wilde and the rise of sexual science there was an open, public and concerted discussion of same-sex desire that went to the heart of Victorian notions of masculinity, civil society, class and identity. How did homosexuality come to be known as a 'secret vice', consigned to a secret place - the closet - when contemporaries regularly described its existence as widespread, threatening and even notorious? "Nameless Offences" asks where the closet came from and how the English learned to describe that which was 'nameless' and indescribable in this way. This groundbreaking book offers the definitive portrait of male homosexuality in the nineteenth century and includes many perceptive insights into what it reveals about the interaction between public and private morality which lay at the heart of Victorian England.
Table of Contents
List of maps, tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Histories of the Closet?
PART I
Prosecuting the 'Unnatural Crime'
Policing Sodomy in the Nineteenth-Century City
PART II
Reading the Sodomite
Respectability, Blackmail and the Transformation of Scandal
PART III
'A Strange and Indescribable Feeling': Unspeakable Desires in Late-Victorian England
Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 30 Nov 2009 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781848850903 |
| Imprint | I.B. Tauris |
| Dimensions | 216 x 138 mm |
| Series | Social and Cultural History Today |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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