Transgender and The Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing
Rachel Carroll
Abstract
Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the lif ... More
Transgender and the Literary Imagination examines a selection of literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors first published between 1918 and 2000, each text featuring a protagonist (and in some cases two) whose gender identity differs from that assigned to them at birth: George Moore’s naturalistic novella set in an 1860s Dublin hotel, Albert Nobbs (1918); Angela Carter’s dystopian feminist fantasy The Passion of New Eve (1977); Jackie Kay’s contemporary fiction inspired by the life of a post-war jazz musician, Trumpet (1998); Patricia Duncker’s historical fiction based on the life of a nineteenth-century colonial military surgeon, James Miranda Barry (1999); David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000), a rewriting of the life of Lili Elbe, reputed to be the first person to undergo gender reassignment treatment. A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives – whether historical or fictional – have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities and histories. By revisiting twentieth-century narratives and their afterlives, including stage and film adaptations, this book aims to examine the legacies of this representational history, exploring the extent to which transgender potential can be recovered and realised.
Keywords:
adaptation,
feminism,
fiction,
history,
intersex,
life writing,
queer theory,
race,
transgender,
twentieth century
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474414661 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474414661.001.0001 |