Progressive-Era Sexuality and the Nature of the Beast in Henry James

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23733720
AutoresMichael Lundblad (autor de correspondencia)
Año2013
Páginas31-48
Fecha de publicación2013-02-07
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaThe birth of a jungle (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199917570.003.0012
OpenAlexW2484035875
ISBN9780199917570
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas64

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that the discourse of sexuality shifted at the end of the nineteenth century from an emphasis on sexual acts to sexual identities. Sedgwick builds upon Foucault's famous declaration that the “species” of the homosexual was born at that moment. But Sedgwick and others working on histories of sexuality in the United States have elided the discourse of the jungle: Darwinist-Freudian constructions of “the human” and “the animal” that redefine various behaviors in relation to animal instincts. This helps to explain why the discourse of sexuality shifted at the turn of the century, once heterosexuality was naturalized in the name of reproduction. Questions about human sexuality were soon framed within an evolutionary epistemology that was fundamentally new, but still in transition. After tracing the genealogy of the jungle through Darwin, Kipling, and Freud, this chapter focuses on alternative constructions of the relationship between animality and sexuality that are revealed in Progressive-Era texts.

Art · Biology · Closet · Evolutionary biology · Genealogy · Human sexuality · Instinct · Jungle · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sexology · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Psychology