Christopher Isherwood: A Major Model for the Margin?
Keywords:
Christopher Isherwood, twentieth-century American literature, twentieth-century British literature, gay literature, homosexuality, narrative technique, thematic criticismAbstract
The present article explores the fact that Christopher Isherwood, an author who was an American citizen for almost half of his life and who wrote his masterpiece, A Single Man (1964), as an American writer, is excluded from mainstream histories of American literature. The article reviews primarily sources on American gay literature that establish Isherwood as one of the major formative figures of the twentieth-century gay novel. It concludes that in the age of authors coming from the margin to the center, the mainstream histories of American literature paradoxically seem to have pushed a major author to the margin of literary life.
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