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BOOK REVIEWS ters in relationship to each other has the same effect. Each chapter, with the exception of the first one, is the next step in a well thought out argument. At the same time, between and among chapters a rich complex of associations, connections, and recognitions emerges. In this way Sexual Anarchy opens up possibilities of relationship and interpretation that remain open after the reader has finished the book. It is this openness to possibilities of meaning and connection, by the way, that enables a reader to appreciate Showalter's observations on a twentiethcentury fin de siècle that, after all, had another decade to go at the time her book was published in 1990. Her comments on late twentieth-century matters may at times seem premature, but they are always provocative and pertinent to her theme. Elaine Showalter's earlier book-length studies revitalized our understanding of British fiction since the early Victorian period and demonstrated that the idea of madness in modern English society is at least in significant part a cultural construct. Her analyses in Sexual Anarchy are similarly important. They illuminate the fin-de-siècle experience of sexual anxiety for us and will reshape our understanding of the Transition period. τ , τ τ, r John J. Pappas Purdue University North Central Gay Fictions Claude J. Summers. Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990.245 pp. $22.95 CLAUDE SUMMERS'S book is a study of a sequence of texts that "both reflect and reflect on the status of gay men"—all the protagonists are white, middle-class men—in the period from Wilde, whose work Summers sees as marking the beginning of modern gay fiction in English, to the novels of Isherwood in the 1960s, on the eve of the emergence of gay solidarity. In chapters on Wilde, Cather ("Paul's Case"), Forster, Gore Vidal's The City and the PilL·^ the stories of Tennessee Williams, Mary Renault's The Charioteer, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Isherwood's A Single Man, Summers shows himself to be a particularly sure-footed critic, especially in the close reading of individual texts. He is clearly and confessedly "not. . . 'disinterested' " and unafraid to make unambiguous judgments—Maurice is a work of "superb artistry," A Single Man is "a tour-de-force"—but the assurance of the judgments is earned by the general acuteness of the reading. Summers is particularly discriminating in pointing out the symptomatic conflicts manifested by 83 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 some of the texts. Thus, Renault's novel mirrors many of the homophobic attitudes of the 1950s, but its optimistic ending is seen as deconstructing the very ideology the book reflects. Summers sees the "strong representative texts" which he discusses as part of "a particular tradition of fictional representations of gay males in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature." One wonders, though, whether this trans-Atlantic tradition is quite as unified as Summers implies. Homosexual love and its literary expression in England has consistently been involved with negotiating divisions of social class which are far more clearly demarcated than in America, while there appear to be patterns in American gay writing that can be directly related to more universal American cultural myths—for example, the myth of innocence, associated with a romantic nostalgia for a simple, rural past, that Summers notes both in his discussion of The City and the Pillar and Giovanni's Room. However, recurring patterns do emerge, as Summers discusses the homosexual man's problematic relationship to his society, be it in England or America. A number of the texts are bildungsromans, the protagonist's struggle towards self-knowledge involving his painfully coming to terms with his sexual impulses, impulses which he himself views with a homophobic horror and fear internalized from the society around him. It is within this pattern that Summers discusses the fiction of Oscar Wilde. "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." and The Picture of Dorian Gray are seen as texts "divided against themselves," reflecting Wilde's "own (unsurprising ) ambivalence" towards his homosexuality, an ambivalence seen also, says Summers, in Wilde's prosecution of Queensberry, a reactionary rather than defiant gesture...

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