‘You are a Magyar’: Sexological and Literary Interdependence in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Based on Foucauldian queer theory combined with historical archives and the keyword ‘effeminacy,’ the cornerstone of David Halperin’s ‘new gay history,’ Simon Joyce in LGBT Victorians (OUP, 2022) argues that ‘the standard narrative’ is that European sexology was grounded in scientific research and assumed ‘that same-sex desire was necessarily accompanied by forms of cross-gender identification and expression,’ whereas British sexology was based in the humanities and assumed the possibility of a ‘reciprocal partnership’ between two virile men (21–24). This Foucauldian fallacy comes from anglocentric scholarship’s gross neglect of Károly Kertbeny’s theory and alleged history of the super-virile homosexual man. Whereas it is certainly true that the transnational distribution of Continental sexology was extremely limited by the so-called Hicklin Standard in the UK and the US, anglophone authors were heavily indebted to sexual sciences in their discussion of male same-sex desire in their works. A case in point is American music critic Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (1906), one of the very first openly homosexual novels in English with a happy ending. In the prefatory, the English Oswald offers his manuscript about his romance with Imre to fight ignorance and help laymen understand male same-sex desire in light of the new classificatory science of sexualities coming from German-speaking Central Europe. As a result, this paper intends to establish the dependence and alliance between sexology and belles lettres by arguing that it is a scientific subtext set against the backdrop of Continental sexology which propels the plot of Imre.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Zsolt Bojti is lecturer at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). He defended his doctoral dissertation, Wilde, Stenbock, Prime-Stevenson: Homophilia and Hungarophilia in Fin-de-Siècle Literature, in March 2022. Currently, he is working on the new scholarly edition of Imre: A Memorandum (1906) by Edward Prime-Stevenson in the Oxford World’s Classics series.