In 2020, Dutch-born Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, who is non-binary, won the International Booker Prize with his novel The Discomfort of Evening. This gave rise to a trend that saw more books being written by transgender authors whose main intended audience were transgender people. The emergence of transgender literature as a distinct branch of LGBT literature took place in the 2010s, when the number of fiction works focused on the topic saw a pronounced growth and diversification, which was accompanied by a greater academic and general interest in the area and a process of differentiation with the rest of LGBT literature. The book sold more than two million copies after publication, but was panned by critics. Among them is Myra Breckinridge (1968), a satirical novel written by Gore Vidal that follows a trans woman hellbent on world domination and bringing down patriarchy. Nonetheless, apart from Orlando, the twentieth century saw the appearance of other fiction works with transgender characters that saw commercial success. Other memoirs written by trans people that have amassed critical success are: Gender Outlaw (1994), by Kate Bornstein Man Enough to be a Woman (1996), by Jayne County Redefining Realness (2014), by Janet Mock among others. įor decades, publications that covered transgender topics were mainly centered on memoirs, with a lengthy tradition that had its earliest example in Man into Woman (1933), by Lili Elbe, and that has lasted until the present times with autobiographical books like The Secrets of My Life (2017), by Caitlyn Jenner. In the twentieth century, it is notable that the novel Orlando (1928), by Virginia Woolf, is considered one of the first transgender novels in English and whose plot follows a bisexual poet that changes gender from male to female and lives for hundreds of years. Representations in literature of transgender people have existed for millennia, with the earliest instance probably being the book Metamorphoses, by the Roman poet Ovid. Transgender literature is a collective term used to designate the literary production that addresses, has been written by or portrays people of diverse gender identity.
Engraving by Bauer for a 1703 edition of Metamorphoses.
0 kommentar(er)
