The Passions of John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 - Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain's most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds's vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself--and of what it means to live in it.

Table of Contents:
Preface: Symonds and his Books Introduction: On the Surface 1: That One Word: Byronic Anticipations of Symonds 2: Dante's Mask: Photography, Tuberculosis, and Hell 3: Homer's Deep: Ancient Greece and Reciprocal Love 4: Symonds's Renaissance: Sensuous Surfaces and Hegelian Limits 5: Animi Figura: Symonds, Stevenson, and the Divided Self 6: Queer Origins: Myths of Childhood, Before Freud 7: Sex Scenes: Symonds in London 8: Queer Sensibilities: Symonds, James, Pater, and Wilde 9: Electric Blue: Symonds on Venice

About the Author :
Shane Butler is the Hall Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, having previously taught at Penn, UCLA, and the University of Bristol. With primary interests in aesthetics and queer theory, he has published widely on classical literature and its reception, Renaissance humanism, the history of sensation, the phenomenology of reading, and the history of sexuality.

Review :
Monumental. At once scholarly and poetic, novelistically gripping and lyrical, Shane Butler's breathtaking investigation of Victorian intellectual John Addington Symonds reveals the complex interminglings between Symonds's personal experience and his writings and establishes him as a queer theorist before queer theory, an indispensable figure for understanding the making and unmaking of modern sexualities. A meta- or anti-biography, a magnificent tribute to the practice of close reading, a work of unconventional cultural history, and a timely theoretical intervention, this book powerfully and innovatively contributes to the debate on Victorian and post-Victorian sexualities...Unclassifiably original, blistering, visionary, Shane Butler is one of the most fearless and inspiring literary and critical theorists of our time. We find in The Passions of John Addington Symonds a good deal of engaging commentary and original interpretation...Butler's own passion for Symonds makes this text foundational ground for reading. It points us to essential literary examples from ancient times, through the Renaissance, and on to the Victorians. We find in The Passions of John Addington Symonds a good deal of engaging commentary and original interpretation.