Queer Atlantic

Hannah argues that the unstable forms of modernist fiction grew out of nineteenth-century social, political, and economic upheavals that turned manhood into a contested category, entangled with racial fears, paranoia about homosexuality, theatrical self-presentation, and same-sex desire. Rather than treating whiteness and masculinity as a given, he asks how the period's celebrated novels show privilege being sustained and shaped by race, geography, gender, and sexuality.

The study centres on five writers already firmly part of the modernist canon: Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. Hannah contends that the anxieties these authors held about white male advantage and queer possibility pushed the novel toward new formal possibilities. He pays particular attention to how men on the move, often crossing the Atlantic, both reinforce and disorient male entitlement.

To place these works in their historical setting, Hannah turns to debates over naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the so-called "new imperialism." Along the way he raises questions for the current field of queer ethics, exploring the unexpected alliance between queer openness to otherness and imperialist thinking in modernist writing.

Hannah maintains that these fictional structures proved surprisingly durable, and he offers a fresh account of how modernism emerged from a disturbance of male privilege, mobility, and desire.