Overview

This highly original book reconsiders canonical long eighteenth-century narratives through the conjoined lenses of queer studies and the environmental humanities. Moving from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Gothic novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jeremy Chow investigates the role that bodies of water play in reading these central texts.Chow navigates various representations and phases of water to magnify the element’s furtive yet pronounced effects on narrative, theory, and identity. Water, Chow reveals, is both a participant and a stage upon which bodily violation manifests. The sea, rivers, pools, streams, and glaciers all participate in a violent decolonialism that fractures, revises, and reshapes notions of colonial masculinity emerging throughout the long eighteenth century. Through an innovative series of intermezzi, The Queerness of Water also traces the afterlives of eighteenth-century literature in late twentienth- and twenty-first-century film, television, and other popular media, opening up conversations regarding canon, literary criticism, pedagogy, and climate change.

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9780813949512

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Reviews

“Clearly and energetically written, Chow makes a valuable and important contribution to blue humanities criticism in the context of eighteenth-century English literary studies. The Queerness of Water moves beyond salt water to river banks, water torture, and ice-scapes, to show how a 'beyond the oceans' approach can renovate blue thinking in the eco-humanities. It builds on existing queer ecostudies by connecting contemporary theorists to historical English literature and by making queer studies more watery and watery studies more queer.” - Steven Mentz, St. John's University, author of Ocean (Object Lessons) “Chow makes an original and substantial contribution to at least three fields: 18th-century literary studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and queer studies. Such a multi-pronged contribution is rare and important. Queerness also features many excellent close readings, including of authors--such as Jonathan Swift--who have rarely been read through a queer lens.” - Nicole Seymour, California State University, Fullerton, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

Author Information

Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University.

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