Jodie Medd's The Cambridge Companion To Lesbian Literature: Themes In Historical Literature

For decades lesbian literature has been trying to break through the mainstream as an established form of literature. Through the years it has seen various shapes and sizes as it has grown from lesbian romance and erotica treated as a taboo to a more accepted and normalised type of literature. The first appearance of lesbian themes in historical literature was in the works of Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, who wrote various lyrical poems that involved expressions of desire towards other women. She is often seen as “the most highly regarded woman poet of Greek and Roman antiquity” (Medd, 3), who in some way paved the way for later lesbian literature to discover the many different varieties of stories concerning gay women. By looking at the changes

Jodie Medd’s The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature (2015) will function as the key text, since the book includes chapters on the origin of lesbian literature, its development over the decades, and mentions various examples on contemporary literature and how the lesbian identity is portrayed in this canon. The different chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature are written by several different authors which will give a much wider view on the different matters within lesbian literature. Aside from the Cambridge Companion, I will also look at Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), to reinforce my research with one other feminist perspective on lesbian identity and stereotypes. De Beauvoir, for example, sees “choosing to be a lesbian” as a convenience for women that want to benefit from their masculine tendencies to gain more power. Other texts will function as insight from different backgrounds and perspectives to either strengthen the stereotyping of the lesbian identity, or will shed a light on contrasts between the manner in which lesbian women are depicted in historical works and contemporary

The second chapter will be the first close analysis of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson. This chapter will include a small synopsis of the novel, the findings through close-reading and a compare and contrast section that will link the novel to the academic texts mentioned earlier. The third chapter will be of the same structure as the second chapter, but chapter three will be about Landing (2007) by Emma Donoghue. Finally the conclusion will be a summary of the results from the analyses and form the answer to the research