Full Description
The second edition of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture continues the groundbreaking work of the original, exploring the territory between gay/lesbian studies, literary criticism, and religious studies. This much-anticipated follow-up examines the appropriation and/or subversion of the authority of the Judeo-Christian Bible by gay and lesbian writers. The book highlights two prevalent trends in gay and lesbian literaturea transgressive approach that challenges the authority of the Bible when used as an instrument of oppression, and an appropriative technique that explores how the Bible contributes to defining gay and lesbian spirituality.
Reviewers of the first edition of Reclaiming the Sacred hailed the book's enterprise in exploring the area between literary criticism and religious studies. Whereas contemporary literary-critical theory has been slow to integrate religion and religious history into queer theory, this pioneering journal has addressed the issue from the start with a collection of thoughtful and though-provoking articles.
This latest edition expands coverage to include noncanonical ancient texts, popular Victorian religious texts, and contemporary theater. Academics and lay readers interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and religious studies will gain new insights from topics such as:
religious mystery and homosexual identity in Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi
same-sex biblical couples in Victorian literature
homoerotic texts in the Apocrypha
sodomite rhetoric in a seventeenth-century Italian text
Radclyffe Hall's lesbian messiah in her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness
homosexual temptation in John Milton's Paradise Regained
Reclaiming the Sacred counteracts the manipulative and oppressive uses to which modern writers and thinkers put the Bible and the morality it is presumed to inscribe. An important tool for understanding the role of the Bible in gay and lesbian culture, this remarkable book makes a powerful contribution to the advancement of studies on queer sanctity.
Contents
About the Editor
Contributors
Preface to Second Edition
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Homoerotic Texts in the Apocrypha: Naked Man with Naked Man
Chapter 3. The Discourse of Sodom in a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Text
Chapter 4. The (Homo)Sexual Temptation in Milton's Paradise Regained
Chapter 5. Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism and the Subversion of Biblical Authority in Rochester's Sodom
Chapter 6. What a Friend We Have in Jesus: Same-Sex Biblical Couples in Victorian Literature
Chapter 7. Missionary Positions: Reading the Bible in E. M. Forster's The Life to Come
Chapter 8. The Well of Loneliness, or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall
Chapter 9. Narrative Inversion: The Biblical Heritage of The Well of Loneliness and Desert of the Heart
Chapter 10. Inverted Conversions: Reading the Bible and Writing the Lesbian Subject in Jeannette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Chapter 11. All Men Are Divine: Religious Mystery and Homosexual Identity in Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi
Index
Reference Notes Included
