The ‘impossible subject’: Tom Crewe’s Genealogy of Gay Culture in The New Life (2023)
Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life is a historical reference to a progressive Fellowship, a forerunner of the Fabian Society, committed to promoting sexual emancipation in the last decade of Victorian England, the context of Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895. Epistemologically, ‘the New Life’ is also th...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Tom Crewe’s debut novel The New Life is a historical reference to a progressive Fellowship, a forerunner of the Fabian Society, committed to promoting sexual emancipation in the last decade of Victorian England, the context of Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895. Epistemologically, ‘the New Life’ is also the liberty taken by a historian when he ventures into the realm of fiction, to reimagine the past from the vantage point of what was a utopian project in the first place. Indeed, Crewe emancipates himself from the strictures of solid facts and firm chronology. Crewe’s contribution to the ‘neo historical novel’ consists in taking up an authentic source, Sexual Inversion (1897), a medical textbook, co-authored by John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, to (mostly) imagine the gay sub(counter)culture of the 1890s. By celebrating emancipatory movements (Uranians but also feminists and reformers of all stripes) Crewe suggests that there is more to history than what is actualised by facts recorded by historians. We read The New Life through the prism of ‘queer historicism’ before contrasting it with Justin Torres’s Blackouts (2023). |
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