1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910466908903321

Autore

Tobin Robert Deam

Titolo

Peripheral desires : the German discovery of sex / / Robert Deam Tobin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

0-8122-9186-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (328 p.)

Collana

Haney Foundation Series

Classificazione

GM 1600

Disciplina

830.9/353

Soggetti

German literature - 19th century - History and criticism

German literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Homosexuality in literature

Homosexuality and literature

Homosexuality - Germany - History - 19th century

Homosexuality - Germany - History - 20th century

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface. Peripheral Desires -- Introduction. 1869-Urnings, Homosexuals, and Inverts -- Chapter 1. Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts -- Chapter 2. The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation -- Chapter 3. Jews and Homosexuals -- Chapter 4. "Homosexuality" and the Politics of the Nation in Austria, Hungary, and Austria-Hungary -- Chapter 5. Colonialism and Sexuality: German Perspectives on Samoa -- Chapter 6. Swiss Universities: Emancipated Women and the Third Sex -- Chapter 7. Thomas Mann's Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice -- Chapter 8. Pederasty in Palestine: Sexuality and Nationality in Arnold Zweig's De Vriendt kehrt heim -- Conclusion. American Legacies of the German Discovery of Sex -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830's through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors,



politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe-and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna. In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient. As Germany-and German-speaking Europe-became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality.