Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle

Fraser Riddell (University of Durham)

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English

Cambridge University Press
27 March 2025

Theory of music & musicology; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Gender studies, gender groups; Gay & Lesbian studies

Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Drawing on an ambitious range of interdisciplinary material, including literature, musical treatises and theoretical texts, Music and the Queer Body explores the central place music held for emergent queer identities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Canonical writers such as Walter Pater, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf are discussed alongside lesser-known figures such as John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Engaging with a number of historical case studies, Fraser Riddell pays particular attention to the significance of embodiment in queer musical subcultures and draws on contemporary queer theory and phenomenology to show how writers associate music with shameful, masochistic and anti-humanist subject positions. Ultimately, this study reveals how literary texts at the fin de siècle invest music with queer agency: to challenge or refuse essentialist identities, to facilitate re-conceptions of embodied subjectivity, and to present alternative sensory experiences of space and time. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

By: Fraser Riddell (University of Durham)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781108984584
ISBN 10: 1108984584
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 27 March 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Dr Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in Literary Medical Humanities at Durham University. Recent publications include articles in Victorian Literature and Culture and the Journal of Victorian Culture, as well as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Decadence. He previously taught at Trinity College, Oxford and the University of St Andrews.

Reviews for Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle

'… offers a crucial contribution to conversations in both Victorian studies and queer musicology about the relationships among aesthetics, erotics, embodiment, and subjectivity. Riddell invites readers in both fields to reimagine music not as a utopian source of identity affirmation, but rather as a “startlingly antihumanist” force that fosters a range of complex, difficult, and often disturbing affects and experiences (51).' Shannon Draucker, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies