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Since the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men in 1985, the emergence of male homosexuality at the fin de siecle has become a prominent topic in Victorian literary studies. The appearance of new books by Laurel Brake, Linda Dowling, and Alan Sinfield offers an opportunity to consider the range of ways in which these topics are now being considered. Brake's book combines the study of textual politics (the material conditions in which texts are written, edited, and published) with an interest in late-Victorian sexual politics. Dowling examines how the polemical affirmation of sexual and emotional ties between men developed as one unanticipated consequence of the attempt after 1860 by Oxford figures such as Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison to turn Oxford University into the "intellectual center" of "Britain as a world civilization" (xiv). Sinfield considers how what he refers to as "the cross-sex grid" (162) came to inform the concept of male homosexuality in the twentieth century. He argues that the representation of Oscar Wilde at the time of the trials in 1895 as effeminate, a dandy, and a member of that new species, the male homosexual, provides the leading point of reference for the subsequent constitution of male homosexual subjects.
The modern invention of the homosexual is an idea that Michel Foucault proposes in volume one of The History of Sexuality: "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy on a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43). The books under review testify to the special significance of male homosexuality within Foucault's more general project. For instance, Foucault introduces the important concept of reverse discourse while discussing the constitution of the homosexual subject in a variety of discourses. The three books under consideration here provide examples of how homosexual reverse discourses have been elaborated within various discursive contexts. But it is not only this idea that the writers adapt from Foucault: they also rely on the concept of power-knowledge, discussed in the same volume of The History of Sexuality, and a thematized sense of what, in chapter seven of The Order of Things (1970), Foucault refers to...