Betram Cope's Year
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) is a novel by Henry Blake Fuller. Having established himself as a leading figure in Chicago’s burgeoning literary scene, Fuller—a pioneer of American realist fiction—produced this late masterpiece, often considered one the nation’s earliest homosexual novels. Both profound and funny, Bertram Cope’s Year is a classic campus story that critiques the social lives of academics while emphasizing the struggles of its intelligent young hero. “Of course, there is no more reason for assuming that every man will make a good lover than that every woman will make a good mother or a good housekeeper. Or that every adult male will make a good citizen....I don't feel that I'm an especially creditable one. So it runs. We ground our general life on theories, and then the facts come up and slap us in the face.” Where theories fail, experience is all that remains. For Bertram Cope, a promising young English instructor, this truth proves both enticing and dangerous—searching for recognition, he suffers from self-doubt; searching for love, he finds romance wherever he turns. As he balances his work alongside affairs with older men and women, as well as some fleeting matches with women his own age, Bertram finds himself longing for his old friend Arthur Lemoyne, perhaps the only person who has always treated him as human. Hilarious and heartfelt, Bertram Cope’s Year is a groundbreaking work of queer literature that continues to entertain and inform over a century after it was published. This edition of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year is a classic work of queer American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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After New York publishing houses rejected the manuscript, probably on the grounds of its homosexual subtext, Fuller self-published this novel in 1919 to a devastating silence broken mainly by negative reviews. Although Edmund Wilson would later call it one of the best novels of its time, it has not been republished until now. The bittersweet core of the narrative, discreetly implied, is the homosexuality of its hero, Edmund Cope, a young professor who arrives at the Evanston, Ill.-based town of Churchton and is taken in by a society of genteel Midwestern eccentrics, including a widowed socialite, an aging bachelor who dreams of surrounding himself with entertaining young men and three young women who scheme for Cope's attention. Meanwhile, the self-centered, oblivious Cope writes letters to his absent friend, Arthur Lemoyne, and finally encourages Lemoyne to join him in Churchton. With a prose style as correct and detached as his protagonist, Fuller describes a series of seriocomic misunderstandings, including Cope's accidental marriage engagement, and flamboyant Lemoyne's banishment from the university after making a public romantic gesture toward a male cast member in a college drama. An amusing entertainment in its own right, this novel is also an important discovery for the gay literary canon, particularly (as essayist Andrew Solomon points out in his afterword) for its rare portrayal of day-to-day gay domestic life.
