Both writers published their work when the concept of sexuality was rigidly oppressed, thereby creating a common denominator to illuminate their corresponding battle as homosexuals. The most important reasoning for the selection of these authors is that they have not been compared closely.

The predominant objective of this thesis is to highlight the response towards sexuality when Wilde and O'Brien's work was published and how this influenced their subsequent writing. My thesis question will investigate the reception of sexuality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Kate O’Brien’s novel As Music and Splendour (1936). Further, I argue that all of these works of fiction show a deep investment in pleasure – including pleasures that derive from disreputable narrative modes – which undermines appeals to the respectable, restrained homosexual subject that were central to reformist discourse. Meanwhile, the investment in comedic modes of authors such as Angus Wilson, Michael Nelson and Brigid Brophy helped to shape visions of homosexual life that differed from those produced by mainstream reformist agendas. Novels by authors such as Martyn Goff, Rodney Garland and Mary Renault are ambivalent about the principal paradigm for appraising homosexuality in the post-war period, the social problem. Indeed, I demonstrate how the decade’s homosexual novels variously sustain, evade and problematise the prevailing liberal discourse on homosexuality I contend that they cannot therefore be recruited straightforwardly to a progressivist history of sexuality. I show that these books demand closer attention as their alignment with reformist logic is far from unambiguous. This mode of fiction has broadly been understood to have served first and foremost as a vehicle for arguments for the decriminalization of homosexual relations.

This chapter examines the proliferation of the ‘homosexual novel’ in Britain in the 1950s.

Room for Trouble by Shirley Verel