Issue Details: First known date: 2012... 2012 Male Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Guys, Guises and Disguise in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Twyborn Affair (1979) critically confronts the politics of sex while revealing the author's private inner world. Patrick White's last novel but one adumbrates the representation of traditionally invisible alternative models of sexuality in literature which, according to Robert Dessaix, have been given topicality in the 1980s and 1990s due to a loosening of sexual repression. The themes of homosexuality and transvestism which White tackled earlier in his fiction are now the cynosure of all eyes and fused with identity concerns, even though the author did not intend his novel to be a piece of queer activism.

The Twyborn Affair is quintessentially a social comedy verging on the comedy of errors in which the traditional gendered dichotomy is subverted in order to blur clear-cut distinctions between what is meant to be masculine and feminine. This essay will explore the themes of literary representation, psychology, seduction, gender deconstruction, sexual identity and the politics of ambiguity in relation to male beauty in the novel.' (Author's introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 22 Jan 2015 09:21:06
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-99682-20130519-0001-dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/bitstream/2328/25951/1/Male_Beauty_in_the_Eye_of_the_Beholder.pdf Male Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Guys, Guises and Disguise in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affairsmall AustLit logo Transnational Literature
X