Queer Kinship after Wilde investigates the afterlife of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period within a global context. Drawing on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, it tells the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who turned to the fin-de-siecle past for inspiration as they attempted to operate outside the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaboration in pursuit of different models of connection that might facilitate their disentanglement from conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde attends to the successes and failures that resulted from these experiments, the new approaches to affiliation inflected by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that occurred within these networks as well as the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.

Focuses on figures who saw themselves as part of a Decadent tradition as they revised the concept of the family in the early 20th century.

About the Author
Kristin Mahoney is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Gender in a Global Context at Michigan State University. Her first book, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.


Book Information
ISBN 9781009011501
Author Kristin Mahoney
Format Paperback
Page Count 299
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 489g