Epistemology of the Closet, Updated With a New PrefaceSince the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde Sedgwick analyzes a turn of the century historical moment in which sexual