Queer Reading Practices and Sexology in Fin-de-Siècle Literature

<p>This book scrutinises the production and transnational distribution of sexological knowledge at the turn of the century. The works of three transnationally mobile authors are in the focus: <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray </i>(1890/1891) and <i>Teleny </i>(1893) by and attributed to Oscar Wilde; ‘The True Story of a Vampire’ (1894) by Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock; and <i>Imre: A Memorandum </i>(1906) by Edward Prime-Stevenson. The textual analysis is governed by references in all four works to Hungarian culture to demonstrate how they conceptualised ‘Hungarianness’ and same-sex desire simultaneously in the light of the new classificatory science of sexualities coming from German-speaking Central Europe. By foregrounding a timely literary angle and a ‘culturalist’ approach this book offers non-Anglocentric insights not bound by either language or nationality to shed new light on the interdisciplinary reading practices of late-Victorian subjects and the ways they contributed to the emergence of <i>fin-de-siècle </i>queer fiction.</p>