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Literary London Reading Group

Event Details

Time: January 15, 2013 from 6pm to 7:30pm
Location: Senate House Room 234
City/Town: London
Website or Map: http://www.ull.ac.uk/library/…
Event Type: seminar
Organized By: Peter Jones, Lara Atkin and Lisa C Robertson,
Latest Activity: Dec 10

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Event Description

After two successful sessions treating ruin and rent strikes London's streets, our first session of the new year will shift our attention to London's suburbs. We are delighted to announce that Martin Dines will introduce our third event: 'Bringing the Boy Back Home: Domesticity and Egalitarian Relationships in Post-war Queer London Novels.' This session will take place on Tuesday, 15th January, 2013 from 6.00 - 7.30pm in Senate House Room 234.

These postwar novels map a variety of queer habitats across London. The most desirable of these, the bourgeois home, corresponds to the new figure of respectable, private homosexual, who avoids the disreputable public spaces of the city. But these texts suggest that such a clear-cut spatial separation is by no means straightforward. What motivates these novels' ‘retreat’ from the urban ‘underground’ into domesticity? What seems to problematize such a move?

Martin Dines is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University, where he also participates as a researcher for the Centre for Urban Studies. He is the author of Gay Suburban Narratives in British and American Culture: Homecoming Queens (2009), has contributed to edited collections on London and Dennis Cooper, as well as publishing articles on topics as various as sitting rooms and suburban gothic. His research is concerned with the relationship between national identity and sexuality.

Copies of the readings are available from the links below (best read in the suggested order):

Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile, 1953

Martyn Goff, The Youngest Director, 1961

James Courage, A Way of Love, 1959

This event is open to the public; please do invite colleges, friends, and other varieties of affiliates!