Given the paradoxical media environment for gay athletes and the struggle they face in shaping their own stories, the sports autobiography offers a rich and understudied site to trace the evolution of gay athlete stories in the media. This chapter analyzes five of the most prominent gay athlete autobiographies to date, told over a three-decade time period from 1977 to 2007, to reveal the discourses athletes use to construct their identities surrounding sport, sexuality, athleticism, and identity. The project offers a comparative analysis of the major themes that emerged in gay athlete autobiographies and how these stories were shaped over time and across different cultural and sporting contexts.

Religion is central to Seamus Heaney’s work. Alongside his preoccupations with Catholic and Celtic belief, ancient Greek and Roman religions are significant in Heaney’s methodological palette, in which ‘low intensity’ allusions to aspects of religious culture can inform operations of poetry and ritual. Greek and Roman culture provides Heaney with a repository of spirit-guide figures, symbolic characters such as Heracles and Tiresias, forms and tropes, including funerary rituals, burial, pilgrimage, and katabasis, and entire works which the poet reimagined, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Antigone, in which civic and religious duties intersect in ways germane to the poet’s reflections on his own time.

American gay military life writing emerged as a discrete literary genre in the last decades of the twentieth century. These memoirs include tales by older men who served in World War II and accounts by younger soldiers who navigated the challenges of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In this chapter, I compare these two cohorts of writers to examine their experiences of institutional life and male bonding in the American forces. Their stories, and their purpose for writing, reveal how the forces shaped sexual and political subjectivities. Gay men from the 1940s used their narratives to document the service of “fairies” and butch men attracted to one another, straight soldiers and commanders who accepted gay personnel despite official policies, and the infinite opportunities for sex and friendship. Servicemen of recent decades tell a different story of protest. Their gay life was lonelier than their ancestors, and their memoirs function as conversion narratives. In “coming out,” they craft a respectable masculine self to demand the right to serve openly. Soldiers in both eras recall experiences of prejudice and resistance in an organization hostile and conducive to sex and love between men.

Dante’s defense of the life of reason can guide our consideration of the most current concerns.We are more in need that ever of a theoretical basis for openness, for ongoing inquiry, and for a genuinely common good. Dante’s understanding helps us think more clearly about the dogmatisms of our age, which, as ever, envision comprehensive transformations of human life uninformed by the moderating self-knowledge available in the poem.

As our power grows, it becomes more necessary judge its use, to assess the relative weight of the goods we seek when that power is deployed.To do so, we rely on reason as a guide. But reason’s capacity to adjudicate among goods is widely doubted. It requires a defense. This chapter argues that a premodern thinker may best be equipped to meet this need.

This chapter examines James Shirley’s Caroline tragedy The Traitor and its engagement with its political, social and theatrical contexts. It discusses the ways in which the corruption and uncontrolled cupidity of the tyrannous Duke, and the desire for power of his court favourite Lorenzo, disrupt such stabilising social and political bonds as marriage, friendship, family, hospitality and allegiance, and raise uncontrolled passions and conflicts of allegiance in his subjects. This disruption and its dangers are read in the light of Caroline political arguments over prerogative power, law, liberties of the subject and Catholic allegiance. Reading the play intertextually, the chapter shows how Shirley’s revisioning of earlier revenge drama and his engagement with the tropes of Caroline tragicomedy emphasise the tragic futility of Amidea’s death, and highlight the dangers to social structures, subjects and monarchs themselves of failing to acknowledge and contain passions and take opportunities for reasoned reform.

Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

Chapter 3 takes us through Fanon’s complex relations with French society as a kind of ‘family romance’. The chapter engages with the interplay of language, gender and colonial politics, critiquing along the way simplistic, non-intersectional analyses which privilege, say, gender (e.g. Bergner) to the exclusion of racial difference. The chapter concentrates on Fanon’s reading of Capécia and Maran, exploring the ways in which both language and sexuality are marked by the dimension of colonial ideology. The chapter engages with the elements of this family romance, analysing how the notion of race traverses gender and sexual politics.

Ireland’s Jewish population experiences a hyphenated identity. At once insiders andoutsiders, and part of an ever-shrinking population, Irish Jews express a sense ofisolation and vulnerability, of being reduced to media stereotypes or expected toperform an essentialized Jewishness.  Parallels between the Irish and the Jews arefamously drawn in Ulysses, echoing a trope found elsewhere in Irish writing,whereby the two peoples find a shared history of oppression, migration, and exile. Such affinity on the page does not necessarily translate to lived experience on theground, however. Today, Irish Jews express an awareness of being othered, afeeling of conditional acceptance within an official Irish narrative of tolerance, whichthey connect with Irish perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The voices ofthe Jewish community in Ireland tell us something about the problematics (andpossibilities) of an ambivalent identity, the site of ongoing formation and negotiation.

Paradiso I and II present, in compressed form, the procession of All from the Highest, and the soul’s ascent back to the perfection of the First Cause. Yet Dante also highlights the valley between the peaks, our world of multitude, difference, and limit. Like the Bible, Paradiso has two beginnings: Canto I from the divine perspective, Canto II from the human.

The latter reflects the inequality that follows from the “power to swerve” with which reason endows us. It grants broad latitude regarding how to live, making us differ from one another more than other beings – a difference so significant as to question whether Dante’s happiness could be shared by all.

These Cantos depict, in counterpoint to difference overcome, the multiplicity, error, and cognitive limits that make the Comedy possible. The “matter” of Dante’s “song” points beyond terrestrial existence, but the Comedy’s charm binds readers to it; Dante’s deed conflicts with his words. He thus introduces alternative views of happiness, inviting us to weigh the transhumanizing good, secured only by “The glory of him who moves all things,” against that “perfection of our nature,” achievable in this world by a relative few. This choice provides Paradiso a fitting “prologue.”

Focusing on the centerpiece poem of Walt Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass – now a landmark work in the canon of gay literature – this chapter uncovers the paradox at the poem’s core: Seemingly obsessed with courting love and affection toward the poet (the flirtatious lyrical speaker is named “Walt”), it wishes ultimately to deflect such affective tokens not only away from the poet but away from any particular persons. Whitman, the chapter argues, understood conventional erotic love as intense and private but, precisely for those reasons, antidemocratic. He uses an autobiographical feint to transform his readers into indiscriminate lovers fit for democracy, lovers fit for the national orgy of the America we were all promised. His song begins with himself but gradually swells to encompass the entire demos. And, for any reader concluding the poem not having swelled with him, concluding still regarding the poem as autobiographical or a plea for individual love, his instructions are simple: “Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you” – which is to say, “You missed the point; read it again.”

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The de casibus tradition derives both its name and its central concerns from a collection of didactic quasi-historical narratives by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, entitled De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. Boccaccio depicts the fall of prominent figures, from Adam to King Arthur, who have previously enjoyed the benefit of great fortune, in the process demonstrating both the arbitrariness of earthly success and the fortitude which one should demonstrate in the face of inevitable misfortune. This chapter traces the assimilation of this tradition into English writing, via Chaucer, Lydgate and A Mirror for Magistrates, and considers the ways in which de casibus writings explore the tension between fickle fortune and the divine plan, asserting the arbitrariness of earthly life while also implying that people always ultimately get what they deserve. The chapter identifies the tradition’s subversive potential; as it deals in stories about prominent historical leaders and politicians, de casibus literature provides a rich opportunity for writers to pass veiled political comment on the vagaries of their age. The chapter shows how the de casibus tradition facilitates for Marlowe the imagining of a play-world in which the arbitrariness of earthly success and power obfuscates the notion of a divine order.

Chapter 2 goes on to analyse Bhabha’s appropriation of Fanon to promote postcolonial studies in the 1980s. Before challenging the more general postcolonial use that has been made of Fanon, the discussion takes us through careful readings of Bhabha’s primary influences. The main aim of the chapter is twofold: first, to outline how Bhabha deploys Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory and Derrida’s deconstructive criticism as critical tools to interpret the work of Fanon; and second to problematize the appropriation of Fanon in postcolonial and cultural studies. The chapter seeks to challenge Bhabha’s reading of the ‘dissembling self’ in Black Skin, White Masks as a poststructualist notion and his reading of The Wretched of the Earth’s politics as undialectical and transhistorical, as postmodern based on partial truths.