ABSTRACT

This book maps Christopher Isherwood's intellectual and aesthetic reflections from the late 1930s through the late 1970s. Drawing on the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick and the ethical theory of Michel Foucault, Carr illuminates Isherwood's post-war development of a queer ethos through his focus on the aesthetic, social, and historical politics of the 1930s in his novels Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), and Down There on a Visit (1962), and in his memoir, Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939 (1976).

chapter |25 pages

Introduction

chapter |25 pages

The World in the Evening

Isherwood, Pacifism, and the Cultural Politics of the 1930s and Beyond

chapter |20 pages

A Novel Image of Time

Prater Violet as Modern Political Art

chapter |21 pages

Letters and Camp

The Presence of “Minor” Aesthetics in the World in the Evening

chapter |26 pages

Historicizing Subjectivity

Isherwood, Sexual Politics, and Down There on a Visit

chapter |21 pages

Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939

The Politics of Queer Modernity