CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures

Abstract:

This article investigates Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) through the lens of the queer blue humanities. Drawing on the marine science of the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and the Jamaican naturalist Richard Hill, and the fin-de-siècle literary interest in the queer littoral, I show how encounters with coastal life fostered playful, fluid ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. At the same time, they also shed light on the precarity of a sea's edge subject to a rapidly growing tourist and collecting industry, and, in this way, merge queer and ecological forms of desire.