In Christopher Looby’s scintillating collection of short stories, we are — to recall a seminal debate between the canon makers — confronted with an archive far closer to the whispering, transgressive American literary history of Leslie Fiedler (1960) than to the blaring, jingoistic one sketched in Richard Chase’s account (1957). Yet, unlike the more obliquely homoerotic texts “outed” by Fiedler, most of the fictions collated in Looby’s collection are not the anamorphic artifacts at which one needs to squint in order to see sexual or other kinds of deviance. Indeed, the fluorescent queerness of several of these stories will likely provoke many to ask, “Was this really published in nineteenthcentury America?” In many of the stories, we encounter ample testament to the fact that the nineteenth century was far less “Victorian” than we are accustomed to thinking, far less normative than our crudely progressive chartings of modernity often suggest. I admire Looby’s volume immensely and am convinced that it ought to have a significant impact on both queer literature and American literature syllabi across the globe. It is hard not to marvel at the range of queer stories Looby has collected here. Almost all somehow trouble the nineteenth century’s foundational ideas about gender and domesticity, including its thoroughgoing support for the nuclear family and its separatespheres ideology. For example, a number of the stories are propelled by their characters’ preoccupation with proscribed love objects (including Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney”). Several stories feature unconventional “couples” who resist pervasive pressures to conform to the nuclearfamily

中文翻译：

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十九世纪刚刚变得酷儿

在克里斯托弗·卢比 (Christopher Looby) 精彩纷呈的短篇小说集里，我们——回想一下经典制作者之间的一场开创性辩论——面对的档案更接近于 Leslie Fiedler (1960) 窃窃私语、越界的美国文学史，而不是勾勒出的刺耳、沙文主义的文学史在理查德蔡斯的帐户（1957 年）。然而，与 Fiedler 所“淘汰”的更倾斜的同性恋文本不同，Looby 收藏中的大多数小说都不是人们需要眯着眼睛才能看到性或其他类型的越轨行为的变形文物。事实上，其中几个故事的荧光性古怪可能会引起许多人的疑问，“这真的是在 19 世纪的美国出版的吗？” 在许多故事中，我们遇到了一个事实，即 19 世纪远没有我们习惯认为的“维多利亚时代”，远没有我们粗略进步的现代性图表通常所暗示的规范。我非常欣赏 Looby 的著作，并相信它应该对全球的酷儿文学和美国文学教学大纲产生重大影响。很难不惊叹 Looby 在这里收集的各种酷儿故事。几乎所有这些都以某种方式困扰着 19 世纪关于性别和家庭的基本观念，包括它对核心家庭及其分离领域意识形态的彻底支持。例如，一些故事是由他们的角色对被禁止的爱情对象（包括赫尔曼梅尔维尔的“我和我的烟囱”）的全神贯注推动的。