Inspired melodist and brilliant orchestrator of symphonies, operas and ballets, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky passed away #onthisday in 1893.
Rediscover his works with us: dgt.link/tchaiko-deep
Inspired melodist and brilliant orchestrator of symphonies, operas and ballets, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky passed away #onthisday in 1893.
Rediscover his works with us: dgt.link/tchaiko-deep
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century - Amazon.com
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century [Graham Robb] on Amazon.com. *FREE* super saver shipping on qualifying offers. A brilliant work of ...這是昨天在書林買的廉價書精裝220元.
我在廁所翻翻其照片 就覺得夠本.
正文只看了第一章偏見引的哥德書信....
Out from the cold
Strangers by Graham Robb is a sparkling survey of homosexuality in the 19th century, says Alan Hollinghurst
Buy Strangers at Amazon.co.uk
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
by Graham Robb
342pp, Picador, £18.99
"A strangely merry adventure" is how Graham Robb describes the experience of writing his new book, and a cheerful mixture of optimism and scepticism colours almost every aspect of it. The effect is enjoyably disconcerting. Robb is under no illusions about the force of residual antipathy to homosexuality, but he makes one feel how far we have come in the past 30 years.
Brian Reade's anthology of Victorian gay writing Sexual Heretics, published in 1970, was one of the first books to explore the territory that Robb now covers. In the wake of changes in British sexual offences law, and in a time of rapidly evolving attitudes to sexuality, it offered a novel picture of an earlier culture coming to terms with similar doubts and self-doubts about an almost unnameable idea. One of Reade's points was that in British literature it was only after 1850 or so that homosexual emotions were taken seriously. The seriousness was exciting to the modern reader, and if some of the sexual heretics were coy or pedantic there were also extracts from first-rate poets - Tennyson and Hopkins and Housman - in whom the power of language matched the power of a half-hidden subject.
It's hard now, when that subject is so widely acknowledged as almost to have lost its distinguishing interest, to recapture the thrill of those revelations and reclamations. The gay reader wanted more of them, and it was hardly surprising that over the following decades, as gay studies started to take on the heft of a discipline, there were ever bolder attempts to catch bigger writers (Henry James being an eminently recalcitrant example) in what Robb calls "the elastic web of gay revisionism".
His own book makes little attempt, beyond a brief engagement with Foucault, to situate itself in the context of those 30 years of theory and debate. It is rather the fruit of his own wide and curious search for a vanished gay civilisation, and is marked by his characteristic wit, scholarship and good sense.
He makes numerous revisions of his own, and one of the refreshing features of the book is that its story does not culminate in the martyrdom of St Oscar. Robb deals with Wilde's trial in a few well-judged pages, showing incidentally that the notorious Labouchere Amendment of 1885 in fact made no difference to the rate of prosecutions for indecency, and that had Wilde been convicted at any time in the previous 200 years he would probably have received the same sentence. It is one of Robb's points, none the less, that the shadow of the Wilde case stretches far over the 20th century, an era glimpsed beyond his survey as a kind of Dark Ages for homosexuals.
As a biographer Robb has been drawn to subjects (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) notable for extraordinary energy and for their artistic triumphs over circumstance; and in Strangers he shows a similar respect for the energy and ingenuity of 19th-century homosexuals.
He takes wherever possible the most positive view of their experience. This is often a matter of ironies and paradoxes inherent in attempts to control the invisible "society of strangers". Just as censorship is well known to be a way of generating interest in a subject, so legal and medical approaches to the punishment or cure of homosexuality provided unintended sources of reassurance. Thus the humiliating medical consultation was none the less a unique chance for honest self-expression; and the medical case-history had unintended uses, even if possible excitement was curbed by professorial Latin ("Only occasionally did he dare to socios concumbentes tangere et masturbationem mutuam adsequi", and so on).
Similarly, the widely reported prosecutions of prominent gay men helped to inform the social identity of others. Press reports in Sydney (which seems to have been the gayest place in the world in the mid-19th century) gave information about where sodomites found companions, and where they took them afterwards - as Robb says, "to the horror of some and for the convenience of others".
This "silver lining" attitude informs Robb's succinct and fascinating sketches of the "outing" of various notable figures. The writer Astolphe de Custine was indirectly responsible for the first sympathetic novel about a gay man, Olivier (1822), written by his enterprising would-be mother-in-law, the duchesse de Duras, to explain his mysterious reluctance to marry her daughter. Two years later Custine was violently queer-bashed on the way to an assignation with a soldier on the road to St Denis. But as Robb shows, the forcible outing occasioned by the publicity was a kind of liberation for Custine, who was ostracised by the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, but gained a licence of sorts to live as he wanted, to travel and to write his masterpiece, La Russie en 1839.
Robb gives comparable accounts of the "unexpectedly pleasant results" of the outing of Winckelmann and of the poet Von Platen. But the hero of the book is perhaps the journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the only 19th-century person to declare his homosexuality publicly - which he did at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich in 1867. Afterwards not everyone reacted well, but many were supportive and debated the matter with him further. "For a supposedly futile gesture," writes Robb, "the speech was remarkably successful."
If the example of these lives is often moving, the wider treatment of the subject can seem at times unduly blithe. In his early chapter on the law, Robb writes that "19th-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained. Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment." That sounds to me like quite a lot to suffer from; but the brightness of Robb's approach, welcome in so many ways, seems to mask a reluctance to confront these darker questions.
There isn't a dull moment in Strangers, and one begins to wonder if the history of millions of people living at variance with society, the law and indeed themselves can justly be represented in so short and sparkling a survey. The fact is, as Robb once or twice acknowledges, that his project, more than that of most social histories, depends on an impossibility: the knowledge of experiences which were not recorded, and are not known. So the sparkle tends to be that of notoriety, or of the few exempted by social brilliance or literary skill.
The unease is deepened by the summary speed with which the later parts of the book hurtle along. Robb's admirable determination to make "Europe" mean more than "Britain and a variety of continental holiday destinations" in fact makes his remit unmanageably wide. The whole question of gay society in metropolitan Russia, illuminated by recent studies of Tchaikovsky in particular, is whizzed past. Fascinating matters such as dress codes and terms of endearment are merely glanced at. The glimpse of Stonewallesque rioting in Paris when police tried to close down gay cruising grounds in the Champs Elysées in the 1840s, an episode amazingly eye-catching to the modern reader, surely deserved more than a sentence.
In his final chapter Robb relaxes and expands into delightful analyses of two 19th-century fictional detectives: Poe's Auguste Dupin, and Sherlock Holmes. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" he sees, with Poe's covert encouragement, as more deeply a mystery about Dupin than about the cases he solves. He picks up numerous esoteric hints about the character of this dandyish outsider prone to nocturnal wanderings with his "enthralled disciple", the narrator; and concludes convincingly that Dupin "appears to be that rarest of birds in 19th-century literature: a happy homosexual".
With Holmes, there is less to prove: "Everyone already knows, instinctively, that Holmes is homosexual", "a camping aesthete" whose "softer human emotions" are reserved entirely for his disciple, Dr Watson. Robb notes that Holmes was held up as a role model by Baden-Powell in his manual Scouting for Boys: "The title has since acquired an accidental ambiguity which suits Holmes quite well." But the larger irony, resonantly to Robb's purpose, is that these detectives symbolise a recuperation of the scapegoat by a homophobic society; in "the dream-world of literature", at least, they could be idolised and imitated.
· Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Line of Beauty, is published by Picador next April.
by Graham Robb
342pp, Picador, £18.99
"A strangely merry adventure" is how Graham Robb describes the experience of writing his new book, and a cheerful mixture of optimism and scepticism colours almost every aspect of it. The effect is enjoyably disconcerting. Robb is under no illusions about the force of residual antipathy to homosexuality, but he makes one feel how far we have come in the past 30 years.
Brian Reade's anthology of Victorian gay writing Sexual Heretics, published in 1970, was one of the first books to explore the territory that Robb now covers. In the wake of changes in British sexual offences law, and in a time of rapidly evolving attitudes to sexuality, it offered a novel picture of an earlier culture coming to terms with similar doubts and self-doubts about an almost unnameable idea. One of Reade's points was that in British literature it was only after 1850 or so that homosexual emotions were taken seriously. The seriousness was exciting to the modern reader, and if some of the sexual heretics were coy or pedantic there were also extracts from first-rate poets - Tennyson and Hopkins and Housman - in whom the power of language matched the power of a half-hidden subject.
It's hard now, when that subject is so widely acknowledged as almost to have lost its distinguishing interest, to recapture the thrill of those revelations and reclamations. The gay reader wanted more of them, and it was hardly surprising that over the following decades, as gay studies started to take on the heft of a discipline, there were ever bolder attempts to catch bigger writers (Henry James being an eminently recalcitrant example) in what Robb calls "the elastic web of gay revisionism".
His own book makes little attempt, beyond a brief engagement with Foucault, to situate itself in the context of those 30 years of theory and debate. It is rather the fruit of his own wide and curious search for a vanished gay civilisation, and is marked by his characteristic wit, scholarship and good sense.
He makes numerous revisions of his own, and one of the refreshing features of the book is that its story does not culminate in the martyrdom of St Oscar. Robb deals with Wilde's trial in a few well-judged pages, showing incidentally that the notorious Labouchere Amendment of 1885 in fact made no difference to the rate of prosecutions for indecency, and that had Wilde been convicted at any time in the previous 200 years he would probably have received the same sentence. It is one of Robb's points, none the less, that the shadow of the Wilde case stretches far over the 20th century, an era glimpsed beyond his survey as a kind of Dark Ages for homosexuals.
As a biographer Robb has been drawn to subjects (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) notable for extraordinary energy and for their artistic triumphs over circumstance; and in Strangers he shows a similar respect for the energy and ingenuity of 19th-century homosexuals.
He takes wherever possible the most positive view of their experience. This is often a matter of ironies and paradoxes inherent in attempts to control the invisible "society of strangers". Just as censorship is well known to be a way of generating interest in a subject, so legal and medical approaches to the punishment or cure of homosexuality provided unintended sources of reassurance. Thus the humiliating medical consultation was none the less a unique chance for honest self-expression; and the medical case-history had unintended uses, even if possible excitement was curbed by professorial Latin ("Only occasionally did he dare to socios concumbentes tangere et masturbationem mutuam adsequi", and so on).
Similarly, the widely reported prosecutions of prominent gay men helped to inform the social identity of others. Press reports in Sydney (which seems to have been the gayest place in the world in the mid-19th century) gave information about where sodomites found companions, and where they took them afterwards - as Robb says, "to the horror of some and for the convenience of others".
This "silver lining" attitude informs Robb's succinct and fascinating sketches of the "outing" of various notable figures. The writer Astolphe de Custine was indirectly responsible for the first sympathetic novel about a gay man, Olivier (1822), written by his enterprising would-be mother-in-law, the duchesse de Duras, to explain his mysterious reluctance to marry her daughter. Two years later Custine was violently queer-bashed on the way to an assignation with a soldier on the road to St Denis. But as Robb shows, the forcible outing occasioned by the publicity was a kind of liberation for Custine, who was ostracised by the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, but gained a licence of sorts to live as he wanted, to travel and to write his masterpiece, La Russie en 1839.
Robb gives comparable accounts of the "unexpectedly pleasant results" of the outing of Winckelmann and of the poet Von Platen. But the hero of the book is perhaps the journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the only 19th-century person to declare his homosexuality publicly - which he did at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich in 1867. Afterwards not everyone reacted well, but many were supportive and debated the matter with him further. "For a supposedly futile gesture," writes Robb, "the speech was remarkably successful."
If the example of these lives is often moving, the wider treatment of the subject can seem at times unduly blithe. In his early chapter on the law, Robb writes that "19th-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained. Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment." That sounds to me like quite a lot to suffer from; but the brightness of Robb's approach, welcome in so many ways, seems to mask a reluctance to confront these darker questions.
There isn't a dull moment in Strangers, and one begins to wonder if the history of millions of people living at variance with society, the law and indeed themselves can justly be represented in so short and sparkling a survey. The fact is, as Robb once or twice acknowledges, that his project, more than that of most social histories, depends on an impossibility: the knowledge of experiences which were not recorded, and are not known. So the sparkle tends to be that of notoriety, or of the few exempted by social brilliance or literary skill.
The unease is deepened by the summary speed with which the later parts of the book hurtle along. Robb's admirable determination to make "Europe" mean more than "Britain and a variety of continental holiday destinations" in fact makes his remit unmanageably wide. The whole question of gay society in metropolitan Russia, illuminated by recent studies of Tchaikovsky in particular, is whizzed past. Fascinating matters such as dress codes and terms of endearment are merely glanced at. The glimpse of Stonewallesque rioting in Paris when police tried to close down gay cruising grounds in the Champs Elysées in the 1840s, an episode amazingly eye-catching to the modern reader, surely deserved more than a sentence.
In his final chapter Robb relaxes and expands into delightful analyses of two 19th-century fictional detectives: Poe's Auguste Dupin, and Sherlock Holmes. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" he sees, with Poe's covert encouragement, as more deeply a mystery about Dupin than about the cases he solves. He picks up numerous esoteric hints about the character of this dandyish outsider prone to nocturnal wanderings with his "enthralled disciple", the narrator; and concludes convincingly that Dupin "appears to be that rarest of birds in 19th-century literature: a happy homosexual".
With Holmes, there is less to prove: "Everyone already knows, instinctively, that Holmes is homosexual", "a camping aesthete" whose "softer human emotions" are reserved entirely for his disciple, Dr Watson. Robb notes that Holmes was held up as a role model by Baden-Powell in his manual Scouting for Boys: "The title has since acquired an accidental ambiguity which suits Holmes quite well." But the larger irony, resonantly to Robb's purpose, is that these detectives symbolise a recuperation of the scapegoat by a homophobic society; in "the dream-world of literature", at least, they could be idolised and imitated.
· Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Line of Beauty, is published by Picador next April.
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