Queer Reading Practices and Sexology in Fin-De-Siècle Literature: Wilde, Stenbock, Prime-Stevenson

This book scrutinises the production and transnational distribution of sexological knowledge at the turn of the century. The works of three transnationally mobile authors are in the focus: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) and Teleny (1893) by, and attributed to, Oscar Wilde; ’The True Story of a Vampire’ (1894) by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock; and Imre: A Memorandum (1906) by Edward Prime-Stevenson. The textual analysis is governed by references in all four works to Hungarian culture to demonstrate how they conceptualised ’Hungarianness’ and same-sex desire simultaneously in the light of the new classificatory science of sexualities coming from German-speaking Central Europe. By foregrounding a timely literary angle and a ’culturalist’ approach, this book offers non-Anglocentric insights, not bound by either language or nationality, to shed new light on the interdisciplinary reading practices of late-Victorian subjects and the ways they contributed to the emergence of fin-de-siècle queer fiction.

Zsolt Bojti is a senior lecturer at the Department of English Studies of ELTE Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) and is editor-in-chief to the Department’s scholarly journal, The AnaChronisT. His research focuses on the intersection of nineteenth-century German sexology and the English literary history of sexuality at the turn of the century.