Queer, Quaint, and Camp: Alan Hollinghurst's Own Return to the English Tradition

Résumé 0

Alan Hollinghurst purports to introduce a gay perspective in his essays and fiction writing. He draws a subtle distinction between the “gay novel,” in which the homosexual condition and male fellowship are given prominence, and the “homosexualization of the novel”: an attempt to aestheticize fiction so that it escapes the normative claims of morality. For Hollinghurst, Ronald Firbank is the chief exponent of what he regards as an enterprise to subvert the novel, through a marginalized, eccentric point of view. This article argues that, far from taking the novel into new, unchartered territories, Hollinghurst is a writer of the Tradition, even if the tradition he revives is on the margin of the mainstream. Using one of the novelist’s favourite tropes, it can be said that from The Swimming Pool Library to The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst follows a curved line of continuity.