Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio

Book excerpt: Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.