‘Now—For a Breath I Tarry’: Breath, Desire and Queer Materialism at the Fin de Siècle

Riddell, Fraser

Abstract

Riddell explores how tropes of breath and breathlessness articulate the relationship between materiality, desire, and loss for queer subjects in Victorian literature. The essay presents readings of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, John Addington Symonds’s Memoirs, and Walter Pater’s ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (from Imaginary Portraits). It also examines nineteenth-century sexology (including writings by Magnus Hirschfeld) to demonstrate how certain modes of breathing were directly associated with non-normative sexuality in the period. Riddell draws upon insights from contemporary queer theory, in its turns toward negative affect and phenomenology, to examine precarious forms of embodied subjectivity in the history of homosexuality. By doing so, he demonstrates how experiences of embodiment are never universal but closely bound up with individual subject positions (such as sexuality and gender).

Citation

Riddell, F. (2021). ‘Now—For a Breath I Tarry’: Breath, Desire and Queer Materialism at the Fin de Siècle. In C. Saunders, D. Fuller, & J. Macnaughton (Eds.), The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (345-365). (1). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_17

• Online Publication Date: Oct 2, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Oct 29, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 18, 2022
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 345-365
• Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
• Edition: 1
• Book Title: The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary
• ISBN: 9783030744427
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_17
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1653594
• Contract Date: Jan 3, 2020