Outing Goethe & His Age

This collection of twelve essays reclaims the age of Goethe as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann’s art treatises and Goethe’s plays to Friedrich Schlegel’s self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist’s letters. This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-18th and early-19th-century Germany. The essays show how sexual and gender orientation during the age of Goethe, though blurred, was constantly being restructured, often in a way that coopted queerness into reifying heterosexuality. As a result, around the first decade of the 19th century the contours of the closet began to form. The book as a whole testifies to the centrality of this period for gay and lesbian archaeology, offers ways to read for homosexuality in pre-20th-century authors, and argues strongly for the birth of aesthetics out of the spirit of homoeroticism .