ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011) in the context of both theories of historical fiction and recent debates about the role of description in literary criticism. The novel revisits the Bloomsbury Group, a site of English modernism that would seem to need no “queering.” Yet Hollinghurst, known for helping to import frank gay sex into literary fiction, here shies away from explicit sexual description; the erotic “unmuting” that is a standard feature of queer historical fiction is, in The Stranger’s Child, achieved only partially. This, the chapter suggests, marks a gentle turn away from queer historical fictions that seek to subvert or revise the past, to fill in archival silences in the history of human feeling. Instead, in a revision of Lukács’s famous provocation, this chapter demonstrates that Hollinghurst’s salute to modernism’s queer legacies does not “queer” Bloomsbury so much as describe it.
