In his latest book, Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature, David Greven explores the possible representations of nonnormative and same-sex expressions of desire in works by Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Continuing his long attention to issues of gender and sexuality in previous studies like Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender, Greven's current work combines a historical approach with psychoanalysis as a way to gain new access to antebellum literature's representations of sexuality, especially those which deviate from the period's expected, rigidly heterosexual norms. The study's greater goal is to “establish that a continuum of developing ideas about, attitudes toward, and experiences of sexuality can be tracked from the early nineteenth century to the birth of modern taxonomies,” an effort to correct the difficulties...

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