Queer Dickens - Erotics, Families, Masculinities

Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. 

Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

Dr Holly Furneaux is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester. Queer Dickens , her first monograph, draws on her interests in nineteenth-century literature, histories of sexuality, and Victorian cultures of feeling. She has published articles inNineteenth Century Literature , Philological Quarterly , and The Dickensian on these areas, and has co-edited a special edition of Critical Survey on the topic of 'Dickens and Sex'. She was recently principal organiser of the British Association for Victorian Studies annual conference on the theme of 'Victorian Feeling: Touch, Bodies, Emotions', and is a regular organiser of the venerable Dickensian tradition of 'Dickens Day'.