Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Queer Reading Practices Sexology in Fin de Siècle Literature

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.