Introduction

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies, a wide-ranging and porous area of study that has been especially generative for the larger interdisciplinary field of queer studies over the last three decades. The essays gathered here represent work in queer literary and cultural studies in the vital present, generated with an impulse to suggest new and emerging areas of inquiry, including trans studies as it is entangled with and adjacent to queer studies. All of the essays are original, written expressly for this publication by both established and newer voices in the field. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this Companion foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media including print, tv/film/video, digital media, and performance.