Front cover image for Misreading Anita Brookner : aestheticism, intertextuality and the queer nineteenth century

Misreading Anita Brookner : aestheticism, intertextuality and the queer nineteenth century

Peta Mayer (Author)
"Anita Brookner was known for writing boring books about lonely, single women. Misreading Anita Brookner unlocks the mysteries of the famously depressed Brookner heroine by creating entirely new ways to read six Brookner novels. Drawing on Brookner's legacy as a renowned historian of French Romantic art and on diverse intertextual sources from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renee Vivien and Freud, this book argues that Brookner's solitary twentieth-century women can also be seen as variations of queer nineteenth-century male artist archetypes. Conjuring a cast of Romantic personae including the flaneur, the dandy, the aesthete, the military man, the queer, the analysand, the degenerate and the storyteller, it illuminates clusters of nineteenth-century behaviours which help decode the lives of Brookner's twentieth-century women. This exploration of Brookner's performative Romanticism' exposes new depths within her outsider introverts, who are revealed as a subversive blend of the historical, the contemporary, the masculine and the feminine."-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2020
Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2020
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xiv, 268 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9781789620597, 1789620597
1090854874
The military man, the analysand, and the queer in A Friend from England (1987)
The aesthete in A Misalliance (1986)
The dandy in Brief Lives (1990)
The Flâneur in Undue Influence (1999)
The degenerate in Falling Slowly (1998)
Epilogue: the storyteller returns: Hotel du Lac (1984)