Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture

Book info: Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (Hardcover, 262 pages) – Routledge, 1997. Language: English.

A thought-provoking look at the Bible!Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture explores the territory between gay/lesbian studies, literary criticism, and religious studies. This book examines the appropriation and/or subversion of the authority of the Judeo-Christian bible by gay and lesbian writers. Two prevalent trends in gay and lesbian literature are highlighted--a transgressive approach that challenges the authority of the Bible when used as an instrument of oppression, and an appropriative technique that explores how the Bible contributes to defining gay and lesbian spirituality. Reclaiming the Sacred is unique in its exploration of the area between literary criticism and religious studies. Whereas contemporary literary-critical theory has been slow to integrate religion and religious history into queer theory, this pioneering journal addresses the issue with a collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking articles.Academics and lay readers interested in literary criticism, cultural studies, and religious studies will gain new insights from topics such as:

• sodomite rhetoric in a seventeenth-century Italian text
• Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian messiah in her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness
• homosexual temptation in John Milton's Paradise Regained
• Oscar Wilde’s usurpation of the language of both The Song of Songs and The Book of Revelation to ape the paradox of biblical sensuality and construct an alternative identityReclaiming the Sacred counteracts the manipulative and oppressive uses to which modern writers and thinkers put the Bible and the “morality” it is supposed to inscribe. An important tool for understanding the role of the Bible in gay and lesbian culture, this remarkable book makes a powerful contribution to the advancement of studies on queer sanctity.

About the Author Raymond-Jean Frontain, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, where he teaches courses in the Bible as literature, gay and lesbian literary traditions, and the Bible and gender construction. He is the editor of three collections of essays on biblically related literary traditions: The David Myth in Western Literature (Purdue University Press, 1980), Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), and Old Testament Women in Western Literature (UCA Press, 1991). His articles on the appropriation of biblical motifs in English Renaissance texts and on homoerotic appropriations of the biblical story of David have appeared in numerous scholarly journals.