Review by Choice Review
Haggerty's latest book adds an interesting dimension to his other works on 18th-century desire and sexuality, e.g., Men in Love (CH, Dec'99, 37-2019) and Unnatural Affections (CH, Dec'98, 36-2036). Here Haggerty (Univ. of California, Riverside) investigates transgressive social and sexual relations and "the ways in which all normative ... configurations of human interaction are insistently challenged and in some cases significantly undermined in these fictions." In part 1 the author defines a theory of erotics by reading authors such as Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin alongside theories of transgressive sexuality. In part 2 he examines how discourses and grand narratives such as Catholicism and history inform cultural collapse caused by male-male desire. And in the last part Haggerty moves into the late-19th and 20th centuries in order to investigate a reimagining of the gothic following its pathological depictions by sexologists and psychoanalysts. Late arrivals such as Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Patricia Highsmith, Haggerty argues, revise the gothic model while addressing some of the same concerns as their predecessors. This sophisticated reading is well suited to join such studies as Carol Margaret Davison's Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (CH, Jan'05, 42-2652) and Ellen Brinks's Gothic Masculinity (2003). ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. Pruitt University of Wisconsin--Rock County
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
