Revolutionary Bodies: Homoeroticism and the Political Imagination in Irish Writing

Revolutionary Bodies analyses how a revolutionary imagination is realised in several Irish literary works of homoerotic passion.

Homoerotic depictions of male bodies in writing by Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan and John Broderick merged with debates about aesthetics, religion, socialism, and Irish anti-colonialism. More recently, a 'post-Stonewall' politicised gay identity was given fictional expression in the work of Irish novelists - Colm Tóibín, Keith Ridgway, Jamie O'Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others.

These writers challenge and subvert stigmatising ideas about 'homosexuals' and 'gay men'. Through a series of richly textured and original readings, Michael G. Cronin demonstrates that the writers depict homoerotic relations in stylistically experimental ways - generating a distinctive strain of utopian writing. This condenses most powerfully around images of the male body as desirable and vulnerable, rather than in relation to themes of gay identity and injury. The linkages between revolutionary possibility and archaic or discredited cultural traditions - such as Irish republican ballads - can be traced through the adaptation and renewal of standard motifs. Cronin shows how we here witness the formation of a new historical and social consciousness in and through the act of writing itself.

This book proposes that, through this innovative investigation of Irish literary tradition, we can reinvigorate our critical understanding of the significance of 'sexual freedom' in contemporary circumstances. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse, Cronin argues that a radical re-examination of images of gay men in capitalist society may ultimately help us to reconceive the ideal of sexual liberation for all.