Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics

The first extensive analysis of the relation of erotic philosophy to homosexuality in the modern period, this book focuses on homoerotic (mis)appropriations and subversions of homoerotic conceptions of romantic love in texts by eight authors: Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Ronald Firbank, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault, and Roland Barthes. In doing so, the author both positions these authors as experimental and influential erotic theorists and protests the critical undervaluation of love (as opposed to desire) in the construction of sexuality as we know it.