Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism

by Joseph Allen Boone

From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism.Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist c

528 pages, Paperback

First published February 3, 1998

Reviews

[Jesse]

In his dissection of sexual expression and literary modernism Boone embraces the unstable, polymorphous quality of queer sexuality, and he takes on a dizzying array of texts for close analysis, from Brontë to Freud to Woolf to the Harlem Renaissance to Faulkner to Lessing and many others in between. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to read beyond the sections devoted to Djuna Barnes and Tyler and Ford's The Young and the Evil, my two textual preoccupations this last year, but I will certainly be going back to read his take on the other works, which I'm assuming will exhibit just as much nuance and insight. But perhaps most helpful was the opening chapter establishing a theoretical framework in which to account for this diverse range of texts, which is one of the finest examples of queer theory I've yet come across. He even managed to make the psychoanalytic elements of his argument palatable for me, which, believe me, is no easy feat.