Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850-1930

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? What drew John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater to write socio-cultural studies of the era? Or Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Vita Sackville-West, and Louis Couperus--to name but a few--to set novels and plays in Renaissance Italy? That question is at the heart of this volume, which begins by showing that the Renaissance (as depicted by German and British intellectuals from 1850 onward) was an era whose hallmarks were beauty, self-expression, criminality, and sexual dissidence. As new laws and sciences emerged that banned or pathologized relations between members of the same sex, this imagined Renaissance which married beautiful bodies to criminality and expansive self-fashioning provided models of same-sex love that went beyond the prevailing paradigm of ethereal and pedagogical Greek Love. The first study to address the close ties between the anarchist-individualist and gay rights movements in 1890s Germany, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style suggests, too, that if we are to begin to map out the genealogy of our own era's consummate type, the impeccably stylish gay man, we might look to the nineteenth-century's peopling of the Renaissance with sexually corrupt--but aesthetically immaculate--individualists.