Queer Lineations

Abstract

At the December 2006 MLA convention, the Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature organized a session titled “Queer Lineations: Robert K. Martin and Gay Literary Studies” to recognize the scholarly inventiveness and political commitment of one of the pioneers in LGBTQ studies. The three papers reprinted here—by Judith Scherer Herz of Concordia University, Eric Savoy of the University of Montreal, and Christopher Nealon of the University of California at Berkeley—sound the depths of Martin's scholarship in the context of the continued unfolding of LGBTQ studies. Martin's work includes his pathbreaking study, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), and influential writings on American, British, and Canadian authors, artists, and theorists, including E. M. Forster, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and many others.