Identity and intertextuality in Alan Hollinghurst's novels

Abstract

This thesis analyses the narrative discourses through which (homo)sexual identity is rendered at the turn of the century and millennium in the novels of the english writer alan hollinghurst. He has written four novels so far: the swimming-pool library (1988), the folding star (1994), the spell (1997) and the line of beauty (2004). He has received several prestigious awards, though it is worth noting the mann booker prize for his last novel. His production is inscribed in the long english literary tradition (though other traditions are also present), and particularly in a number of genres and works which have been associated with same-sex desire and gay identity. That is why, after revising the straight and gay canons, the thesis turns to the literary tradition produced after the liberation movements of the nineteen sixties and the aids crisis. Thus, throughout hollinghurst's production, it becomes increasingly obvious how old discourses are updated and used by a new generation so that gayness can be reformulated in a new textual form. In fact, with postmodernism and aids, only the textual, and particularly the intertextual, can make sexual marginality visible and representable, always from an ironic perspective. In sum, past and present project each other and, out of this confrontation, hollinghurst can find a successful, new homoerotic discourse.