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The Book of Sodom
The biblical story of the destruction of Sodom has inspired countless literary visions. The city has elicited writing from Milton, Sade, Proust, Dostoevsky and Tournier, among others. This work contains an anthology of Sodom texts spanning several centuries. Paul Hallam has also provided his own reading of these languages of prejudice, obsession and desire in an extensive essay.
- GenresGay
298 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1993
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March 26, 2015
"Conceived in an academic mind, carried out in an elaborate, meticulous manner, The Book of Sodom is everything an encyclopædic study is supposed to be: thorough, reliable, referential, and organised. The non-compilatory part of it (90 pages of introduction, author's thesis and a short conclusion) is flamboyant, buoyant, intellectually cynical, vivid and camp.
The compilation, Sodom Anthology, is almost all-encompassing (with a possible omission of a couple of texts in smaller languages probably unavailable to author due to language barrier). It deals with excerpts from an early rococo drama and De Sade's “120 Days of” to a commentary on the Eastern practices in his time by Richard Burton (no, not Liz Taylor's customary consort!), from Voltaire and Dostoyevsky to Milton and de Vigny.
The great rebel Apollinaire is set next to a sermon preached to the British Spinster Queen, and, maybe by a lesser coincident, Dante alongside an 18th century report from a court trial on “sodomites”, as gay men were referred to until fairly recently in the West and still are in many Islamic countries (to wit: “people of Lut”). It does not particularly deal with lesbians, although minor references are made throughout.
Although the point could be made that one can pick up any idea and objectify it to a subject of research, trying to cover all aspects of it available from one's predecessors, the idea of the Cities of the Plain definitely has an immeasurable effect on the perception of same-sex desire throughout Judaeo-Christian (and of course, in a somewhat different, yet clearly alike way, also Islamic) world throughout history so that The Book of Sodom will be most valuable (if not required) in the library of every serious gender scholar."
Miodrag Kojadinović: "Valuable for your Library", Angles magazine, Vancouver (BC), Canada, March 1994
The compilation, Sodom Anthology, is almost all-encompassing (with a possible omission of a couple of texts in smaller languages probably unavailable to author due to language barrier). It deals with excerpts from an early rococo drama and De Sade's “120 Days of” to a commentary on the Eastern practices in his time by Richard Burton (no, not Liz Taylor's customary consort!), from Voltaire and Dostoyevsky to Milton and de Vigny.
The great rebel Apollinaire is set next to a sermon preached to the British Spinster Queen, and, maybe by a lesser coincident, Dante alongside an 18th century report from a court trial on “sodomites”, as gay men were referred to until fairly recently in the West and still are in many Islamic countries (to wit: “people of Lut”). It does not particularly deal with lesbians, although minor references are made throughout.
Although the point could be made that one can pick up any idea and objectify it to a subject of research, trying to cover all aspects of it available from one's predecessors, the idea of the Cities of the Plain definitely has an immeasurable effect on the perception of same-sex desire throughout Judaeo-Christian (and of course, in a somewhat different, yet clearly alike way, also Islamic) world throughout history so that The Book of Sodom will be most valuable (if not required) in the library of every serious gender scholar."
Miodrag Kojadinović: "Valuable for your Library", Angles magazine, Vancouver (BC), Canada, March 1994
Displaying 1 of 1 review