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Article: Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. By Graham Robb. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. Pp. viii, 342. $26.95.)
The subject of this book is homosexual love in Europe and America, "the obstacles it encountered and the societies it created" during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Graham Robb's first chapter, titled "Prejudices," lists scores of theoretical causes--physiological, psychological and social--culled from some 350 contemporary texts, most of them bizarre, even outre. Robb rejects not only Freud's etiology (put forth in his essay on Leonardo), but also Michel Foucault's currently fashionable theory that homosexuality ...