About

The last three decades appear to have been an auspicious period for gay fiction in Britain. A series of landmark legal reforms have punctuated increased social visibility and approbation of LGBTQ+ lives, which have found representation across a flourishing and diverse literary scene. Yet, such advances have been qualified by the discordant reception of the work of gay male authors in the mainstream media, with some reviewers expressing indignation that one Booker Prize-winning novel featured ‘graphic gay sex’, while others neglected to acknowledge at all the sexuality of authors or titular characters. Meanwhile, several gay writers have expressed diffidence with that very appellation, for its being personally, professionally and artistically limiting. This project identifies a dominant mood in British gay male literary fiction from the early 1990s to the present which responds to this still uncertain landscape. This feeling of insecurity, which I term ‘affective precarity’, expresses a lack of confidence in recent advances. I understand this feeling not only to motivate various formal strategies but also to inflect them in particular ways. My project investigates how affective precarity both spurs the avant-garde, ‘a-marketable’ aesthetics of gay fiction produced in the 1990s in the early aftermath of the AIDS crisis, and the subsequent ‘turn’ to realism and historical fiction from the 2000s onwards. It explores how feelings of precarity potentially unsettle the very category of gay fiction while also providing a more expansive frame through which to appraise the writing by authors from various minoritised backgrounds. This project is timely: it will be the first significant critical appraisal of contemporary gay fiction, a development marked by considerable diversification. It also has the potential to make important interventions in ongoing debates about the mainstreaming of marginalised literary voices and the nature of contemporary literature in the wake of postmodernism.