Straightforward: The Narrative Construction of Heteronormativity from Homer to The Hobbit

by Marcus Attwater

When asked to name an archetypal love story, most people will reply 'Romeo & Juliet', although some say 'Tristan & Isolde' instead. Very few will come up with a classical example, and the reason for this is simple: when you say archetypal, it is assumed you mean love between a man and a woman, and instances of this in classical accounts are rare. The reason for this is also not hard to find: as it does now, 'love' in the ancient world meant the affection of equals, and given the inferior position of women in Greek and Roman society, between the sexes is not usually where love is to be found.

Straightforward examines how we got from there to here. It considers how stories from classical, medieval and early modern times, stripped of the romantic expectations modern readers bring to them, reflect the ideals and anxieties of their age, and served as examples of what to pursue and what to avoid. By following these stories and the changes they underwent through the centuries this study attempts to answer two related questions: 'When and why did the heterosexual ideal become normative in our narrative tradition?' and 'What was there before?'

We begin in archaic Greece, with a story that was already old when Homer composed his epics…

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, History

560 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 2019

About the author

Attwater Books is a small publishing house in the Netherlands with a catalogue of English fiction and non-fiction in Dutch. Attwater Books strives to bring its books from writers to readers with as few steps as possible in between. It is all about the story, not about author-reader interaction or creating social media buzz.
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