Raids on the Inarticulate
Raids on the Inarticulate
Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library and the Closets of Imperial and Postimperial British History
This chapter analyzes Alan Hollinghurst's book The Swimming-Pool Library. In contract, Boyd's book An Ice-Cream War is an exclusive male construction which is based on a combination of public school attitudes towards others while the otherness is defined in terms of race, gender, class, and nation. Furthermore, The Swimming-Pool Library takes on the otherness of homosexuality. Indeed, it is generally read as a “gay novel” eulogizing the brief period of relative permissiveness between the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality in Great Britain and the explosive spread of AIDS in the early 1980s. Hollinghurst's linking of two generally unrecorded histories—of black London and of gay London—makes The Swimming-Pool Library a perfect example of what Christopher Lane identifies as the paradoxical nature of homosexual desire in “British colonial allegory.”
Keywords: Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, An Ice-Cream War, homosexuality, black London, gay London, British colonies, homosexual relationships
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