Charting the Waters of Lesbian Literature

Abstract

Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow have the distinction of editing the first book of its kind: a collection of critical essays devoted to lesbian literature in English, along with several essays by contemporary lesbian novelists. Although Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions does not do for AngloAmerican literature what George Stambolian and Elaine Marks did for the French variety in their landmark study, Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts, Critical Texts, Jay and Glasgow's book has similar ambitions and echoes the latter's title. One is tempted to overlook the book's flaws out of sheer gratitude that it exists. Big and baggy, Lesbian Texts and Contexts consists of twenty-two essays that range generically from personal narratives to high deconstructive theory and that treat mostly twentieth-century American fiction, with forays into the nineteenth, as well as into British, French, Quebecois and Native American fiction. Heterogeneous in quality as in style and subject matter, the collection offers a few strong essays but many more weak ones. Jane Marcus's fascinating but haphazard Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well, in which