History's Queer Stories: Retrieving and Navigating Homosexuality in British Fiction about the Second World War (Queer Studies 19)

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012).

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters'The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012).

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1952), Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012) Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 List of Abbreviations 9 Introduction: “Never in the History of Sex was so Much Offered to so Many by so Few” 11 “People’s Pasts [are] so Much More Interesting than Their Futures” – Re-Negotiating the Homosexual Problem Novel 63 “We Have to Do the Things They Tell Us” – Nation, Masculinity and War 135 “The Collapse of a Wall [...] Starts with a Few Loose Bricks” – Queering Space, Body and Time 207 “No Sense of a Tidy Ending”: Resisting Closure 267 Bibliography 289 Index 307 Besprochen in:The Gay & Lesbian Review, 1 (2020), Dale BoylerDHIVA, Sommer 2020, Ulrich Brömmling