In this two-volume work, hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries survey contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer American literature and its social contexts. Comprehensive in scope and accessible to students and general readers, Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States explores contemporary American LGBTQ literature and its social, political, cultural, and historical contexts. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries written by expert contributors. Students of literature and popular culture will appreciate the encyclopedia's insightful survey and discussion of LGBTQ authors and their works, while students of history and social issues will value the encyclopedia's use of literature to explore LGBTQ American society. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and lists additional sources of information. To further enhance study and understanding, the encyclopedia closes with a selected general bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research.

This Concise Companion is a guide to the creative output of the United States in the postwar period, in its diverse energies, shapes and forms. Embraces diversity, covering Vietnam literature, gay and lesbian literature, American Jewish fiction, Italian American literature, Irish American writing, emergent ethnic literatures, African American writing, jazz, film, drama and more. Shows how different genres and approaches opened up creative possibilities and interacted in the postwar period. Portrays the postwar United States split by differences of wealth and position, by ethnicity and race, and by agendas of left and right, but united in the intensity of its creative drive.

Gay and Lesbian Literature Since World War II chronicles the multifaceted explosion of gay and lesbian writing that has taken place in the second half of the twentieth century. Encompassing a wide range of subject matter and a balance of gay and lesbian concerns, it includes work by established scholars as well as young theoreticians and archivists who have initiated new areas of investigation. The contributors’examinations of this rich literary period make it easy to view the half-century from 1948 to 1998 as the Queer Renaissance. Included in Gay and Lesbian Literature Since World War II are critical and social analyses of literary movements, novels, short fiction, periodicals, and poetry as well as a look at the challenges of establishing a repository for lesbian cultural history. Specific chapters in this groundbreaking work trace the development of gay poetry in America after World War II; examine how AIDS is represented in the first four Latino novels to deal with the subject matter; and chronicle the birth of lesbian-feminist publishing in the 1970s--showing how it created a flourishing gay literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Other chapters: outline the history of The Ladder from its initial publication in 1956 as the official vehicle of the Daughters of Bilitis to its final issue as a privately published literary magazine in 1972 examine Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country and discuss the complicated critical history of this work and its relation to Baldwin’s literary reputation--racial, sexual, and political factors are taken into account chart how Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote, and The House of Breath, by William Goyen, reveal contradictory genderings of male homosexuality--suggesting an absence of a unified model of mid-twentieth-century male homosexuality argue that the 1976 novel Lover, by Bertha Harris, can be considered an exemplary novel within discussions of both postmodern fiction and lesbian theory. (The author calls for Harris to be added to the group of writers such as Wittig, Anzaldúa, Lorde, and Winterson, who are discussed within the context of a postmodern lesbian narrative.) examine the short fiction of Canadian lesbian novelist Jane Rule in an effort to shed light on lesbian creative practice in the homophobic climate of postwar North America argue for an understanding of Dale Peck’s novel Martin and John as an attempt to link two apparently different processes of import to contemporary male subjects through examination of the novel alongside selected passages from Nietzsche and Freud focus on the pragmatic issues of developing and maintaining accessible research venues from which to cultivate the study of racial and cultural diversity in lesbian lives Document the history of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, one of the first lesbian-specific collections in the world, from its birth in the early 1970s to the present.

"Allen's book will... provide the categories that will deepen our understanding of lesbian relationships and of lesbian fiction." -- Lesbian Review of Books "Barnes scholars will... want to pick up Carolyn Allen's new book, for it not only offers perceptive readings of Nightwood and the "Little Girl" stories..., but traces the example of Barnes's exploration of lesbian power and loss in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown, and the underrated Bertha Harris." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction "... fascinating... [a] fine volume... " -- Choice "Following Djuna is a fascinating analysis of the textual erotics and lyrical seductions of the work of Djuna Barnes and the writers she influences. This scintillating genealogy of lesbian intertextuality... expands the field of lesbian and feminist literary inquiry and concepts of lesbian literary production." -- Judith Roof "As lesbian literary history, here is an instant classic." -- Jane Marcus "This is an important and necessary book; even further, speaking as an admirer of the writers and literary works it discusses and as a personal expert on lost love, I find Following Djuna irrestible." -- Karen Helfrich, Lambda Book Report Carolyn Allen argues for the importance of women's fiction in understanding women's erotics -- emotional and sexual exchanges between women.

Reprint of the Daughters edition of 1972 with a new 57 p. introduction in which Harris blasts the original publishers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR