"Mappings of secrecy and disclosure": The Swimming Pool Library, the closet, and the empire.
The Swimming Pool Library is a novel of the closet that also offers a post-colonial reading of homosexuality in contemporary culture. Through its interpretation of gay life as a dialogic between Wildean and Gidean readings of homosexuality, and its examination of the closet as what Sedgwick calls "the defining structure of gay oppression," the novel analyzes the tensions of political oppression against sexual freedom. The Swimming Pool Library is thus seen as a text in conflict with itself about the very issues it raises: closeting and gay liberation, sexual freedom and sexual responsibility, loyalty to the past and duty in the present.
Department of English, University of Akron, OH 44325-1906, USA.
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D018451:Homosexuality, Male; D006801:Humans; D008091:Literature; D008297:Male; D012725:Sexual Behavior