Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America
by Jaime Harker
University of Minnesota Press. 216 pages, $22.50
IN RECENT YEARS, Christopher Isherwood’s presence in popular culture has been on the rise, what with the film documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (2008), Tom Ford’s film adaptation of A Single Man (2009), and the BBC’s adaptation of Isherwood’s autobiography, Christopher and His Kind (2010). The University of Minnesota Press has released four books in the 2000s related to Isherwood: his autobiography, Lions and Shadows (2000); Lisa Colletta’s edition of letters between Isherwood and his mother, Kathleen and Christopher (2005); the collection Isherwood on Writing: The Lectures in California (2007); and, last February, Jaime Harker’s Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America.
In her introduction to the latter book, Harker observes that much Isherwood scholarship focuses on his place in the modernist canon and on his homosexuality.
