Hollinghurst, Camp and Closet

This volume analyses the terms “camp” and “the closet” in Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, since all four of his novels—The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998), and The Line of Beauty (2004)—investigate the gay male experience throughout the late-twentieth century. The book analyses these terms in Hollinghurst’s work in order to find out whether the author writes from the margin or from the centre to recreate the origin. Gay subjectivities are of great concern to this study, though it is not a product of identity politics, given the latter’s propensity to re-establish the binary structure of the Western thought. As such, this book explores how Hollinghurst, by camping and closeting the gay male, re-produces homosexuality as a distinct identity with a subculture of its own.