A collection of notes, titles, citations, thoughts, images, acknowledgements, etc. relating to a senior thesis on the intellectual history of male homosexuality in the 19th century.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I should note
I’ve more or less migrated all thesis talk over to my proper blog. The QOTDs there are usually my way of saying what I have to say about Symonds, which is who the thing is really all about these days. We’re looking at three chapters, of which my JP will be the first, on: 1. Symonds in his Victorian intellectual context, addressing his preoccupation with ethics, his particular brand of Hellenism, and his (mis)reading of Whitman; 2. the distribution of the first privately-printed editions of Greek Ethics and Modern Ethics, creating a network of people talking to each other about homosexuality (I hope to be the first person to map out the fate of those original few copies); 3. (provisionally) the Wilde trial, and Wilde as an individual, as the agent which brought Symonds’ ideas out into the open and placed Symonds’ stamp on homosexuality as it was conceived in the 20th century.
Edit: Also, I’ve been toying with some JP titles:
Greeks and Moderns: A Victorian Context for Sexual Ethics
Victorians, Greeks and Moderns: John Addington Symonds and Ethical Homosexual Culture
Victorians, Greeks and Moderns: John Addington Symonds and the Problem of Homosexual Ethics
Problems in Homosexual Ethics: Victorians, Greeks, and John Addington Symonds
