Warm Brothers : : Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe / / Robert Tobin.

In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Fred...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Pennsylvania Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
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Place / Publishing House:Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]
©2000
Year of Publication:2015
Language:English
Series:New Cultural Studies
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Physical Description:1 online resource (256 p.)
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Other title:Frontmatter --
CONTENTS --
Preface: Panic in Weimar --
List of Abbreviations --
1. Queering the Eighteenth Century --
2. Warm Signifiers: Eighteenth-Century Codes of Male-Male Desire --
3. Jean Paul's Oriental Homosexualities --
4. Literary Cures in Wieland and Moritz --
5. Pederasty and Pharmaka in Goethe's Works --
6. Performing Gender in Wilhelm Meister: Goethe on Italian Transvestites --
7. Male Members: Ganymede, Prometheus, Faust --
8. Thomas Mann's Queer Schiller --
9. Lichtenberg's Queer Fragments: Sexuality and the Aphorism --
Conclusion. Made in Germany: Modern Sexuality --
Bibliography --
Acknowledgments --
Index
Summary:In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the period, men identified as "warm brothers" wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed a particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion.There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around "a queer proto-identity." Today, we might consider a canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul a homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others.Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers a much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780812203608
9783110459548
DOI:10.9783/9780812203608
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Robert Tobin.