ABSTRACT
Critical engagements with world literature have brought attention to the ways the field imposes Western periodizations and generic classifications onto non-Western traditions, not to mention the primacy of writing over orality. Far less attention has been paid, however, to the exporting of a distinctly Western mode of reading, one consolidated by the novel, and specifically the Bildungsroman, and the subgenre of the coming-out novel. This chapter begins by exploring the rise of the Bildungsroman and its relationship to an epistemology of the closet; it then shows how the rise of the novel has affected our approach to lyric poetry, leading both to its marginalization in gay anthologies and its “novelization.” The chapter ends with a consideration of the queer translations of lyric poetry by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Aleksei Apukhtin as demonstrating a distinctly lyrical understanding of the lyric—and of reading more generally—that can help us move beyond the stale binaries of the closet and to imagine the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performance.
