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Pride Month 2024 Reading List

In June 1970 the first Pride marches were held in the US, in solidarity with those who protested against police raids at the Stonewall Inn the previous year. Inspired by these events, branches of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) were formed in Britain, and after a series of demonstrations took place across London in support of the men who were being wrongfully convicted because of their sexuality, the UK’s first Pride march took place on July 1st 1972.

To mark this year’s Pride Month, we’ve put together a selection of books and journal articles which teach us about queerness and queer representation – from Enlightenment Trans narratives to new translations of classic Latin American literature.

The Life and Legend of Catterina Vizzani: Sexual identity, science and sensationalism in Eighteenth-Century Italy and England by Clorinda Donato

The first book on transgender identity in early modern Italy and England and the scientific and social debates sparked by the case of Catterina Vizzani, a young Roman who was born a woman, but chose to live life as the man Giovanni Bordoni. Published in partnership with the Voltaire Foundation.

Unexpected Pleasures: Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th-century British Fiction by Lauryl Tucker

Unexpected Pleasures offers an innovative reading of literary works that excessively obey the rules of genre, illuminating a connection between genre parody and queerness in the writing of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Zadie Smith, and others. Published in partnership with Clemson University Press.

Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson by Kristin M. Franseen

This book explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880–1935, focusing primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars. Published in partnership with Clemson University Press.

Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto by Daniel Balderston

In 1924 the Chilean novelist Augusto D’Halmar published a daring novel that tells the story of the love between a Basque priest and a young Andalusian in Seville in the days before the First World War. A classic of Latin American queer literature, this critical edition presents for the first time a corrected text (based on the comparison of several editions), with abundant critical commentary which accounts for the cultural complexity of the novel.

Desire and Disunity: Christian Communities and Sexual Norms in the Late Antique West by Ulriika Vihervalli

New to our Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Belief and Culture series, Desire and Disunity uses a series of fourth to sixth century sermons, letters, laws, and treatises to explore how the Church struggled to christianise sexual norms in the late Roman West.

Read this book Open Access.

Misreading Anita Brookner: Aestheticism, Intertextuality and the Queer Nineteenth Century by Peta Mayer

Drawing on Anita Brookner’s legacy as a renowned historian of French Romantic art and on diverse intertextual sources from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien and Freud, this book argues that Brookner’s solitary twentieth-century women can also be seen as variations of queer nineteenth-century male artist archetypes.

The following journal articles have been made Free to Read throughout June and July:

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