I find it so easy to get lost in the elegance and artistry of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. I originally planned to read this book in a day or two, but it took me a while longer simply because I was so enthralled and moved by the novel's baroque descriptions and its aesthetic focus … Continue reading Fact Versus Fiction: Alan Hollinghurst’s [The Line of Beauty]
Jeanette Winterson, author of the celebrated novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, takes a rather defensive stance when asked if she considers Oranges to be a lesbian novel. She explicitly addresses this question in her personal website by answering it in the negative: No. [Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is] for anyone interested in what happens … Continue reading What is Gay Literature? The Case of Colm Tóibín’s [The Blackwater Lightship]
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (henceforth OANOF) is a 1985 Bildungsroman (novel of development) centered on the life of Jeanette, a girl who is adopted and raised by a woman who happens to be a fundamentalist Christian. Jeanette's mother believes in literal translations of the Bible, and she freely uses religious rhetoric to accommodate her black and … Continue reading Gender and Non-Normativity in Jeanette Winterson’s [Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit]
Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto is an unusual "coming-of-age" story (I'm using this term very loosely) focused on the growth and development of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the illegitimate child of a priest and his teenage housekeeper. Due to his illegitimate birth, Patrick's mother places her child in a Rinso box and abandons him in front of … Continue reading Patrick McCabe’s [Breakfast on Pluto]
"A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam in the greenwood. [...] Happiness is its keynote--which by … Continue reading On Happy Endings and Gay Fiction: E.M. Forster’s [Maurice]
The following post is an excerpt from my seminar paper written for my class on Wilde and Synge: Art as Subversion, offered by Dr. Declan Kiberd at the University of Notre Dame (fall 2012). In this paper, I evaluate the artistic merit of literary comics adaptations using Wilde's views on aesthetics. I then perform a … Continue reading Oscar Wilde and the Graphic Novel: [The Picture of Dorian Gray]
It’s interesting how easy it is for me to forget songs and stories that I heard last year, yet at the same time, it’s so easy for me to recall songs and stories that I heard as a child. Ask me something about the plot of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and I might need a few … Continue reading Listening to the “Unheard Lyric”: Amplifying Faint Discourses in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales
