The Styles of Style

This review considers two books—Benjamin Bateman’s Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction and Taylor Black’s Style: A Queer Cosmology—that define and comment on queer male style in literature and culture. Each study defines style itself as a species of dynamic interrelationships among personal presentations, literary works, and cultural environments. Bateman’s book focuses on environmental issues in E. M. Forster’s Maurice, as well as on questions about the disappearances of birds. Sharing Bateman’s interest in birds, Black’s analysis demonstrates the ways the figure of the bird offers an apt analogy to queer male style.