Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family

Queer Kinship after Wilde explores the legacy of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period, focusing on individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who sought alternative models of connection in a global context.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 299 pages
Publication date: 08 February 2024
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Queer Kinship after Wilde delves into the enduring impact of the Decadent Movement's ideas on kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist era, situated within a global context. By utilizing a wealth of archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, the book narrates the stories of individuals with connections to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who sought inspiration from the fin-de-siècle past as they navigated the boundaries imposed by heteronormative norms, limiting marriage and family practices. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaborations, seeking alternative models of connection that could challenge conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde explores the successes and failures of these experiments, as well as the new approaches to affiliation influenced by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that emerged within these networks. It also sheds light on the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.

Weight: 452g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781009011501