The Publishing of Queer British Fiction, 1945-1967

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According to Iain Young's The Male Homosexual in Literature: A Bibliography, there were over 500 novels featuring queer male protagonists or significant queer subplots published by over 100 different publishers in Britain from 1946-1967. But how was it that multiple publishers came to disseminate the vanguard of what we would now classify as queer British fiction, despite existing in what one interviewee in Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005) describes as the 'intolerant period', an era that saw a drastic increase in prosecutions for 'importuning'? This project will create a publishing history of post-war queer fiction to trace what Robert Darnton calls 'the life-cycle of the book'-the actors and networks responsible for the creation, marketing and reception of these works. Focusing on landmark texts by Mary Renault, Angus Wilson, Martyn Goff and others, it will ask what motivations existed for testing the limits of obscenity law in a time before (and after) the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial. What role did queer publishers such as John Guest play in shaping their lists? Did the Wolfenden Report (1957) affect publishers' decisions? How were these books positioned within a marketplace dominated by public libraries with conservative stocking policies? Were they marketed to appeal to a particular readership? What was their popular and critical reception? More broadly the project will consider the ways in which post-war publishing exploited the ambiguous position of queerness in British society.