Displaying the Monster: Patrick White, Sexuality, Celebrity

Abstract

White’s professions of his sexuality can be seen as attesting to the intertwined, if sometimes conlicting, impulses to confess aspects of one’s private life, and to control one’s public image, that structure the contemporary mode of literary celebrity. His professions were also associated with a shift in the mode of his writing from modernism to postmodernism. It is the interconnections between aesthetic mode, sexual disclosure, and literary celebrity in White’s work and career that I am interested in tracing in this essay.

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Published 1 May 2010 in Volume 25 No. 1. Subjects: LGBTIQ+ literature & writers, Sexuality & sexual identity, Patrick White.

Cite as: Davidson, Guy. ‘Displaying the Monster: Patrick White, Sexuality, Celebrity.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 2010, doi: 10.20314/als.7ad6c6c5d2.