
Unexpected Pleasures
Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th-century British Fiction
Lauryl Tucker(Author)
Liverpool University Press
Published on 3. January 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
282 pages
978-1-83553-880-7 (ISBN)
Description
What are the sources-and the effects-of the pleasurable feeling of power that genre gives us? What happens to that power when conventionality tips into parody? In this book, Lauryl Tucker explores the connection between genre parody and queerness in twentieth-century British fiction. Teasing out the parodic sensibility of writers including Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Dorothy Sayers, Stella Gibbons, and Zadie Smith, Unexpected Pleasures offers an innovative reading of works that seem to excessively obey the rules of genre. By oversupplying the pleasurable sense of knowledge and the illusion of predictive power that genre confers, these works play with readerly expectation in order to expose and queer a broader set of assumptions
about desire, resolution, and futurity. Unexpected Pleasures expands on a burgeoning critical interest in genre as an interpretive tool, and further diversifies the archive and methodology of queer critique. Gathering a surprising group of writers together, it reveals new throughlines between middlebrow and highbrow, and among modernist, mid-century, and contemporary literature. This book will interest scholars of
modernist and contemporary British literature, as well as readers interested in narrative and queer theory.
about desire, resolution, and futurity. Unexpected Pleasures expands on a burgeoning critical interest in genre as an interpretive tool, and further diversifies the archive and methodology of queer critique. Gathering a surprising group of writers together, it reveals new throughlines between middlebrow and highbrow, and among modernist, mid-century, and contemporary literature. This book will interest scholars of
modernist and contemporary British literature, as well as readers interested in narrative and queer theory.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-83553-880-7 (9781835538807)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Lauryl Tucker is an Associate Professor of English at The University of the South. In addition to teaching courses in 20th- and 21st-century British and Irish literature. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection between gender and parody, and she has published articles on Woolf, Stevie Smith, and Dorothy Sayers in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Twentieth Century Literature, and Feminist Modernist Studies (respectively). She contributes to the University of Venus Blog at Inside Higher Ed, and is currently working on a contribution about academic satire for a volume on #MeToo Modernism.
Content
Introduction
Part
One
I.
Writing Lives
1. "By
himself, reading, a naked man": Orlando and the Dutiful
Biographer
2. "By the human clock": Signs of Good Reading in Flush
II.
Gothic Encounters
3. Epistemology of the Woodshed: Stella Gibbons's Gothic
Progress
Part Two
II.
Gothic Encounters, redux
4. Queer Gothic Strategies in Bowen's Short Fiction
III.
Arrivals and Departures
5. "That type of fellar": Desire and Mimicry in Sam
Selvon's Early London Fiction
6. Evolutionary Generics: Miraculous Conventions in Zadie
Smith's White Teeth
IV.
Disciplinary Fictions
7. "Things made in the shape of things": Dorothy Sayers's
Queer Detection
8. "Is this where the narratee sits?": Campus Novels and
Post-critique
Part
One
I.
Writing Lives
1. "By
himself, reading, a naked man": Orlando and the Dutiful
Biographer
2. "By the human clock": Signs of Good Reading in Flush
II.
Gothic Encounters
3. Epistemology of the Woodshed: Stella Gibbons's Gothic
Progress
Part Two
II.
Gothic Encounters, redux
4. Queer Gothic Strategies in Bowen's Short Fiction
III.
Arrivals and Departures
5. "That type of fellar": Desire and Mimicry in Sam
Selvon's Early London Fiction
6. Evolutionary Generics: Miraculous Conventions in Zadie
Smith's White Teeth
IV.
Disciplinary Fictions
7. "Things made in the shape of things": Dorothy Sayers's
Queer Detection
8. "Is this where the narratee sits?": Campus Novels and
Post-critique