Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form

Queer Atlantic explores how canonical novels of modernist fiction explore the ways that privilege is propped up and driven by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality, revealing anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential. It places writers in the context of debates about naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the new imperialism, raising important questions about the current field of queer ethics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 06 January 2021
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

The instability of modernist form is deeply intertwined with the social, political, and economic upheavals of the nineteenth century, which left masculinity as a contested terrain marked by racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. In his groundbreaking work, Daniel Hannah challenges the assumption of white masculinity and explores how canonical novels of modernist fiction delve into the ways in which privilege is upheld and propelled by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality. By examining the works of established writers such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Queer Atlantic reveals that anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential played a significant role in expanding the formal possibilities of the novel. Hannah places these writers within the context of debates surrounding naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the new imperialism, highlighting how masculine mobility, often specifically transatlantic mobility, both enacts and queerly disorients male privilege. Through this analysis, Hannah raises important questions about the current field of queer ethics, highlighting the strange companionship of queer openness to otherness and imperialist thought in modernist writing. Queer Atlantic offers a fresh perspective on modernism's emergence from a troubling of masculine privilege, mobility, and desire, demonstrating the surprising resilience of such fictional structures.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228005667