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
thought
From the same article as below, quoting De Profundis:
“this new life… is, of course, no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of development, and evolution, of my former life.” “I am far more of an individualist than I ever was…. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with.” Like Pater, Wilde employs the conception of development to represent what would otherwise seem a radical disruption of continuity in his mental history, but as his language indicates, the particular conception of development he has in mind is not that of Hegel but rather that of Herbert Spencer. For Spencer and those influenced by him, development was equated with evolution and represented a movement from a lower to a higher level of organization, from homogeneity to differentiation and individuality. At Oxford Wilde studied Spencer and his disciple William Kingdon Clifford, recording in his Commonplace Book paraphrases of, or references to, their ideas of differentiation and individualism as a late stage of organic development.
I see this as relating not just to the individuality of the UC homosexual identity (as compared to the urban WC communities), but also to the coming out process, an intrinsic part of modern homosexuality. I don’t know whether other theorists have discussed this issue before (it sounds like the sort of thing that would not be news) but if we can suggest that the individual-development narrative of a modern person identifying as gay can be related to Oxford Greats Hegelianism, that would be powerful evidence for the disproportionate impact of intellectualism on homosexuality.
