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Abstract
This study examines the relation between Cavafy's sexuality and his poetics within the context of fin de siècle sexual politics in European literature. Two broad questions provoked this study: what is particularly homoerotic about Cavafy's poetry and how does homosexuality inform his poetics? The analysis specifically identifies Cavafy's strategies of evasion and opacity and situates them within the nascent legal, medical and literary discourses of homosexuality. By discussing the concept of ‘reading’ as recognition, two distinct homosexual types are distilled from the poetry; the “Hellenistic” type is explicitly recognized as a social agent with a particular relation to social institutions of his time while the “modern” type remains anonymous and socially marginal bearing evidence to Cavafy's disparate presentation of homosexuality during distinct historical prisms.
Furthermore, this study investigates the eroticization of reader-author relationships and interrogates the asymmetrical dynamic proposed by specific poems. The analysis argues that despite the poetry's explicit advocacy of egalitarian erotic relations between young men, elements of pederastic asymmetry remain tacitly operative in a number of poems that involve authors and readers.
Finally, the dissertation explores the interplay between sexuality and nationalism in the poetry and puts to question the elitist and imperialist nuances of Cavafy's conflation and alignment of homosexuality with the Decadent Movement, Aestheticism, and the Hellenistic imperial period.
