Jonathan Kemp
My website: http://www.jonathan-kemp.com/
An interview: http://www.gasholder.london/2016/09/29/creative-writing-jonathan-kemp-novelist/
I teach creative writing (drama & fiction), and comparative literature. My research interests are language and the body, postmodernism, modernism, gender, sexuality, erotic literature, philosophy, art, the avant garde.
My first novel, "London Triptych" was published August 2010 (Myriad Editions).
It was shortlisted for the inaugural Green Carnation Prize and won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. It has also been shortlisted for the Polari Prize.
An extract is available in the online LGBT fiction journal, Polari
http://www.polarijournal.com/
and another extract and an article here:
http://www.writershub.co.uk/
My second book, 'Twentysix' (Myriad Editions) is a meditation on sex and language in the tradition of Genet, Bataille, Acker.
My first non-fiction book, "The Penetrated Male" - an analysis of the representation of the penetrated male body in Modernist writing - will be out later this year.
An interview: http://www.gasholder.london/2016/09/29/creative-writing-jonathan-kemp-novelist/
I teach creative writing (drama & fiction), and comparative literature. My research interests are language and the body, postmodernism, modernism, gender, sexuality, erotic literature, philosophy, art, the avant garde.
My first novel, "London Triptych" was published August 2010 (Myriad Editions).
It was shortlisted for the inaugural Green Carnation Prize and won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. It has also been shortlisted for the Polari Prize.
An extract is available in the online LGBT fiction journal, Polari
http://www.polarijournal.com/
and another extract and an article here:
http://www.writershub.co.uk/
My second book, 'Twentysix' (Myriad Editions) is a meditation on sex and language in the tradition of Genet, Bataille, Acker.
My first non-fiction book, "The Penetrated Male" - an analysis of the representation of the penetrated male body in Modernist writing - will be out later this year.
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Books by Jonathan Kemp
Homotopia? (composed in 1997 but not published until now) investigates the development of a homosexual discourse at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and reveals how that discourse worked within heterosexualized models of desire. Andre Gide’s Corydon, Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex, and John Addington Symond’s A Problem in Modern Ethics are all pseudo-scientific texts written by non-medical men of letters, and were, in their time, highly influential on the emerging homosexual discourse. The fourth text, the twenty-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherché de temps perdu usually referred to as ‘La Race maudite,’ is the most problematic, in that it appeared under the guise of fiction. But Proust originally planned this ‘essay-within-a-novel’ to be published separately. In it, he offers a pseudo-scientific theory of male-male love. These four texts were published between the years 1891 and 1924, an historical moment when the concept of a distinct homosexual identity took shape within a medicalized discourse centered on essential identity traits and characteristics, and they all work within the rubric of science, contributing to a discourse which saw the human race divided into two distinct categories: heterosexuals and homosexuals. How did this division come about, and what were its effects? How was this discourse sustained, and how were the meanings it produced received? For men whose erotic interest was exclusively in other men, what did it mean to see oneself and one’s desires as the outcome of biology rather than moral lapse?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GREEN CARNATION PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE QRG BEST BOOK AWARD (FICTION)
Three men, three lives and three eras sinuously entwine in a dark, startling and unsettling narrative of sex, exploitation and dependence set against London’s strangely constant gay underworld.
Jack Rose begins his apprenticeship as a rent boy with Alfred Taylor in the 1890s, and finds a life of pleasure and excess leads him to new friendships — most notably with the soon-to-be infamous Oscar Wilde. A century later, David tells his own tale of unashamed decadence while waiting to be released from prison, addressing his story to the lover who betrayed him. Where their paths cross, in the politically sensitive 1950s, the artist Colin Read tentatively explores his sexuality as he draws in preparation for his most ambitious painting yet — ‘London Triptych’.
Rent boys, aristocrats, artists and felons populate this bold début as Jonathan Kemp skilfully interweaves the lives and loves of three very different men across the decades
In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing.
In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these pieces take us to places language doesn’t often go. Kemp powerfully stages a series of anonymous encounters, describing the relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure with luminous intensity, while at the same time facing the impossibility of capturing the moments he describes.
This is a bold and challenging work, unashamedly sensual and searching. Kemp beautifully counterpoises explicit description with a searing interrogation of the extreme measures taken in the quest for sexual fulfillment.
Papers by Jonathan Kemp