Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D'Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D'Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats's and D'Annunzio's drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.

Provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats's and D'Annunzio's drama Draws on a combination of comparative, queer, postcolonial and dramaturgical approaches Examines the relationship between sexual politics and representations of sexuality in Irish and Italian theatre

Autorentext

Dr. Zsuzsanna Balázs is currently Assistant Professor at Óbuda University in Budapest, Hungary. She obtained her Ph.D in Drama and Theatre at the University of Galway, Ireland in 2021. She has written extensively on modern Irish and Italian drama and theatre through a queer and gender studies lens.

Klappentext

Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats s and D Annunziös drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.- 2 Family, Normativity, and the Will to Escape.- 3 Moral Prudery, Respectability, and Broken Intimacies.- 4 Sadomasochistic Attachments: Reverse Power and Erotic Stimulations.- 5 Defiant Dykes: New Women against Patriarchy.- 6 Conclusions.