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Book Cover
E-book
Author Tobin, Robert Deam, author

Title Peripheral desires : the German discovery of sex / Robert Deam Tobin
Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]

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Description 1 online resource
Series Haney Foundation series
Haney Foundation series
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface. Peripheral Desires -- Introduction. 1869--Urnings, Homosexuals, and Inverts -- Chapter 1. Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts -- Chapter 2. The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation -- Chapter 3. Jews and Homosexuals -- Chapter 4. "Homosexuality" and the Politics of the Nation in Austria, Hungary, and Austria-Hungary -- Chapter 5. Colonialism and Sexuality: German Perspectives on Samoa -- Chapter 6. Swiss Universities: Emancipated Women and the Third Sex -- Chapter 7. Thomas Mann's Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice -- Chapter 8. Pederasty in Palestine: Sexuality and Nationality in Arnold Zweig's De Vriendt kehrt heim -- Conclusion. American Legacies of the German Discovery of Sex -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments
Summary In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe-and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna.In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient.As Germany-and German-speaking Europe-became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Homosexuality -- Germany -- History -- 20th century
Homosexuality -- Germany -- History -- 19th century
Homosexuality and literature.
Homosexuality in literature.
German literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
German literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- German.
German literature.
Homosexuality.
Homosexuality and literature.
Homosexuality in literature.
Germany.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2015017222
ISBN 9780812291865
0812291867