Drawing on the insights of leading scholars in the field of transgender studies, the Introduction provides extended consideration of critical and cultural frameworks essential for the project of rereading representations of transgender in twentieth-century literary fiction, including: transgender historiography; feminism and queer theory; LGBT activism and identity politics. More specifically, it examines the following topics: questions of historical representation in relation to historical fiction; the influence of genres of transgender life writing, including memoir and biography; the legacies of Second Wave feminist critiques of transsexuals; the impact of narratives of gender crossing on the interpretation of transgender lives; the relationship between transsexual narratives and intersex bodies; the role of colonial contexts and discourses of ‘race’ in the construction of gender normativity. It concludes with an overview of the book structure, providing summaries of each chapter.

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of “sex,” Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, “author” of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate.

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The under-representation of black British histories and black British actors in British period drama has become the object of increasing public debate.1 Literary adaptations are a significant genre of British period drama, with classic novels of the nineteenth century playing an especially prominent role in British television drama production. However, the persistent absence of non-white faces in these productions has yet to receive sustained critical attention within the field of adaptation studies. 2 The premise of this article is that this absence matters and that it matters in two ways. Firstly, as a popular genre of period drama at home and a key cultural export abroad, the classic adaptation plays a significant role in Brideshead Revisited). 6 An attitude of deference to the source text is a defining feature of the classic adaptation but this is often combined -or even conflated -with an aesthetic of fidelity to the historical past. Indeed, the generic signifiers of classic adaptation borrow significantly from those of period drama, a genre of historical film often characterised by a preoccupation with bygone visual and material cultures. Indeed, an assumption that the appearance of historical authenticity is best achieved through a focus on coherent and consistent designwith an emphasis on costumes, interiors and locations -is a defining feature of period drama.Hence the past is mediated in a number of ways in the classic adaptation. Firstly, the source

The very idea of modernity is closely correlated with the principle that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking. We now suspect that this 'rupture' is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is, repeating and not surpassing it. (Jean-François Lyotard) 1 Set at 'the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century', Nights at the Circus, 2 Angela Carter's fin de siècle fantasy anticipates the new century as an era of radical transformation and change. However, it is also a text fascinated with modernist myths of origin: from the threshold of the twentieth century it returns to the 'prehistory' of the modern, as constructed by modernism, represented by such motifs as animals, folk and peasant culture, childhood, the wilderness of Siberia, and the colonial 'others' of empire. In The End of Modernity, Gianni Vattimo argues that modernity is 'dominated by the idea that the history of thought is a progressive "enlightenment" which develops through an ever more complete appropriation and reappropriation of its own foundations': These [foundations] are often also understood to be 'origins', so that the theoretical and practical revolutions of Western history are presented and legitimated for the most part as recoveries, rebirths, or returns. 3 A return to origin could be read, then, as evidence of a complicity with the forgetting and repressing of origins; a forgetting and repressing which functions as a condition of a subsequent recovery, rebirth or return. Such a reading, however, would seem difficult to reconcile with the fact that in