Richard Kaye

Professor

Areas of Interest: Victorian Literature and Culture, the History of the Novel, Literature of the Fin de Siècle,; Modernism, World War I Literature, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Visual Culture

Richard Kaye is a professor in the Department of English and a member of Hunter's Council on Honors.

Profile

Richard A. Kaye is Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College and in the Ph.D. Program in English at the City University of New York. A graduate of the University of Chicago (BA) and Princeton University (MA, Ph.D.), he served for several years on the editorial staffs of The Nation Magazine and The New York Review of Books. Before coming to Hunter College, he taught at Eugene Lang College and the Parsons School of Design at the New School, and at Davidson College, where he was a tenure-track professor in the Department of English.

He is the author of The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Virginia). His essays and reviews have appeared in the journals Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Literature Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Arizona Quarterly, CUSP, and Postmodern Culture. His articles and reviews have been published in The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, N + 1, and Tablet. He is the editor of a 2018 Broadview Edition scholarly reprint of the 1889 novel A Marriage Below Zero by Alan Dale, the first novel in English to deal directly with the subject of male same-sex erotics.

He was a consultant on (and appeared in) the 2007 BBC documentary “Ian Rankin Investigates Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” filmed in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has served as Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College and as Deputy Chair in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

A recipient of several Andrew H. Mellon Foundation fellowships, he has been a fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Program in Psychoanalysis at Columbia University for his work on a book-length study, They Lived in Triangles: James and Alix Strachey, the Rise of British Psychoanalysis, and the Bloomsbury Moment, a critical-biographical study of the earliest English translators of Sigmund Freud.

He has published widely on Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Brontës, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath. His edited collection, The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Twenty-First Century: New Essays on Oscar Wilde's Classic Novel, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2025. He is completing a book-length study entitled Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination.

Since 2017 he has been the editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review, a fifty-five-year-old journal devoted to new scholarship on Lawrence. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Learn About More Publications

Education Background

Ph.D. Princeton University

Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination. Columbia University Press (forthcoming)
“Sylvia Plath’s ‘D. H. Lawrence’s The Tree of Knowledge versus the Tree of Life,’” D. H. Lawrence Review, 43.2 (October 2021)
“Decadence in Painting,” in Decadence: A Literary History. Ed. Alex Murray. (Cambridge University Press, Fall 2020)
“D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl and the Resistance to the Tragic,” Études Lawrenciennes (Fall 2020)
“Oscar Wilde in Queer Time: Law, Lawlessness, and the After-Life of a Decadent Persona,” in After Queer Studies, Eds. Tyler Bradway and Ellen McCallum (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
“Queer Brontë: Parody, Revision, Identification, and the Pleasures of (Factitious) Myth-Making,” Victorians: Journal of Literature and Culture (Winter 2016)
“’He is the Very Pine-Apple of Politeness’: Richard Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and the English Comedy of Manners,” in Wilde in Earnest. Ed. Emily Eells, (Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2015)
“The New Other Victorians: The Success (and Failure) of Queer Theory in Nineteenth-Century British Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture (Dec. 1, 2016)
“’Oh, God, There is No Woman In This’: A Marriage Below Zero, the Somerset and Russell Scandals, and the Sodomitical Threat to Victorian Marriage, Victorian Review (Spring 2014)
The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. University of Virginia Press, 2002.
"Clamors of Eros," in The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Eds. Robert Caserio and Clement Hawes. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
"Edwardian Fiction," in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Ed Brian W. Shaffer Blackwell, 2011.
"Oscar Wilde and the Politics of Posthumous Sainthood: Hofmannstahl, Mirbeau, Proust," in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio University Press, 2008).
"Salome's Lost Childhood," in The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Ashgate, 2008).
"Sexual Identity at the Fin de Siècle" in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge, 2008).
St. Sebastian: The Uses of Decadence. Exhibition Catalogue for A Splendid Readiness for Death: St. Sebastian in Art. Kunsthalle Wien Museum (Vienna), 2004.
"Gay Studies, Queer Theory, and Oscar Wilde," in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde, ed. Frederick Roden (Palgrave, 2004).
"The Wilde Moment," Victorian Literature and Culture (Spring 2002).
"The Return of Damon and Pythias: A Marriage Below Zero, Victorian Melodrama, and the Literature of Homosexual Representation," College Literature (Winter 2002).
"Portraits of Lady Chatterleys: Jamesian Triangles, Lawrencian Eros, and the Triumph of Cinematic Adaptation in The Wings of the Dove, in Henry James on Stage and Screen, ed. John R. Bradley (Palgrave, 2000).
"Determined Raptures: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence," Victorian Literature and Culture (Spring 1999).
"'A Splendid Readiness for Death': T.S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St. Sebastian, and the First World War," Modernism/Modernity (May 1999).
"Edith Wharton and the 'New Gomorrahs' of Paris: Homosexuality, Flirtation, and Incestuous Desire in The Reef," Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1997).
"'Losing His Religion': St. Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr," in Outlooks: Gay and Lesbian Visual Cultures, ed. Reina Lewis and Peter Horne (Routledge, 1996).
"'A Good Woman on Five Thousand Pounds': Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and Literary Rivalry," Studies in English Literature (Fall 1995).
"Textual Hermeneutics and Belated Male Heroism: Edith Wharton's Revisions of The House of Mirth," Arizona Quarterly (Fall 1995).
"'Intangible Arrows': Wallace Stevens, St. Sebastian, and the Search for the Real," The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 1995).

Contact Details

Richard Kaye

English
68th Street West 1214
(212) 772-5743
krichar@hunter.cuny.edu