Have I missed it?

While compiling this bibliographical essay on studies in historical fiction, I've been nagged by the absence of an expected presence: book-length work on gay & lesbian historical fiction. I thought it must be out there somewhere, especially given the incredible explosion of scholarship on African-American historical fiction--much of it in just the past five years alone--and the mainstream readership for novelists like Christopher Bram, Emma Donoghue, and Sarah Waters. (In Britain, Gay Men's Press publishes a lot of more niche-oriented historical fiction by writers like Chris Hunt.) But I can't find anything at all, which genuinely puzzles me. The most promising-sounding book, Scott Bravmann's Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, 1997), talks about some fiction but emphasizes historiography more generally. There are articles out there, to be sure, but they're not what's called for.

Comments

[Norman Jones]

I wrote my dissertation on this topic and was very interested in pursuing it as a full-length book project, but the buzz I heard from academic presses was that they didn't think its audience would be sufficiently broad. Please email directly (jones.2376@osu.edu) if you'd like to talk more about this, or if you're hearing different buzz. The dissertation abstracts reference is DA3063920.