title: Epistemology of the Closet
author:  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
description: Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual life of the U.S. This has been, to no small degree, due to the popularity of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed <i>Epistemology of the Closet</i>. Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde--Sedgwick delineates a historical moment in which sexual identity became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries.
zlib_text: EPISTEMOLOGY 
  OF THE CLOSET 
  EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 
  University of California Press 
  Berkeley • Los Angeles 
  
  Chapter 4, "The Beast in the Closet," first appeared in 
  Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science tn the 
  Nineteenth-Century 
  Novel, Selected Papers from the English 
  Institute. 1 9 8 3 - 8 4 . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 
  Baltimore/London, 1986, pp. 1 4 8 - 8 6 . Reprinted by 
  permission of the publisher. 
  University of California Press 
  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California 
  © 1 9 9 0 by 
  The Regents of the University of California 
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 
  Epistemology of the closct / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
  p. 
  cm. 
  Includes bibliographical references. 
  ISBN 578-0-520-07874-1 (ppb.) 
  1. American fiction —Men authors —History and criticism. 
  2. Homosexuality and licerature. 
  3. Melville, Herman, 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 9 1 . 
  Billy Budd. 
  4. James, Henry, 1 8 4 3 - 1 9 1 6 - Criticism and 
  interpretation. 
  5. Wilde