Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

Autorentext
YVONNE IVORY is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA. She has taught at SDSU, Duke University, University College Dublin, and the Ruhr University. Her research focuses on the nexus between sexuality and aesthetics, and she has published articles on fin-de-siècle German anarchism, on aestheticism, and on Oscar Wilde's German reception.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: REVIVING RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM Consummate Criminals: Nineteenth-Century Renaissance Historiography and the Homosexual Individualist Inverts: Self-Realization as a Liberatory Sexual Discourse at the Turn of the Century PART II: STYLING QUEER PERSONALITIES Poison, Passion, and Personality: Oscar Wilde's Renaissance Self-Fashioning The Erotics of Fame; or, How Thomas Mann Conquered the Renaissance Orlando Emergent: Vita Sackville-West's Renaissance Personae Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index