Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson. By Kristin M. Franseen

Richard Krafft-Ebing’s early sexological study Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) notoriously included the following question in a checklist designed for readers to self-diagnose their homosexuality: ‘Are you particularly fond of Wagner?’ Foundational work in the history of sexuality—much influenced by Michel Foucault—has focused extensively on how modern categories of sexual identity emerged over the nineteenth century through the proliferation of medical, legal, and religious discourses. In recent years, scholars such as Heike Bauer and Dustin Friedman have argued that late-Victorian literary culture was similarly imbricated with the production of sexual knowledge. Imagining Musical Pasts marks an important advance by arguing for the complex ways in which writing about music at the fin de siècle—whether in biography, fiction, poetry, or music criticism—represented its own form of ‘queer literary musicology’. In doing so, it invites musicologists to take seriously the imaginatively generative work performed by forms of evidence that are sometimes overlooked in scholarly accounts of the musical past—speculation, for instance, about what musical tastes might inadvertently reveal or gossipy jokes, say, about queer Wagnerian enthusiasms.