Lesbians, how novel is a series of three, curated case studies that works to reorient our approach to the lesbian novel genre in the context of twentieth-century American, British, and French literature. Rooted in a feminist politics of recuperation, this dissertation centers primarily on texts that were either out of print when the project began or have been largely underserved by scholars: Stone Butch Blues, Crybaby Butch, Thérèse et Isabelle, The One Who is Legion, and L'ange et les pervers. The third chapter includes an analysis of The Well of Loneliness that reads it as an experimental novel in the larger context of modernism as its iconic status makes this novel inescapable. The primary goal of this dissertation is to bracket the historico-biographical from my analysis of lesbian novels in order to highlight the value of their fictional dimension. Using "lesbian" as metaphor for genre, Lesbians; How Novel redefines the genre in terms of reader interpretation and intertextuality rather than authorial identity, demonstrates how the investment in reading the autobiographical in(to) a novel limits the genre's value to one dimension, and argues that the genre did as much to create our understanding of what it means to be lesbian as it did to represent it. Lesbians, how novel concludes with a coda meditating on the use of fiction to imagine sexuality into being. At its core, this dissertation reflects my investment in discovering the import of fiction to lesbian existence.
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