Chapter 1: Sexualities and Environments in the Norwegian 20th Century -- Part 1: Love between Women as Challenge to the Othering of the Nonhuman -- Chapter 2: Elusive Sapphism -- Chapter 3: Urban Environments in the Lesbian Canon -- Part 2: The Gay Male Pastoral -- Chapter 4: The Political Ambiguity of Pastoral -- Chapter 5: Re-Claiming the Nonhuman -- Chapter 6: Queering the Environment .

This book explores how ideas of nature and the nonhuman play an important part in literary depictions of same-sex desire in twentieth-century Norwegian literature. Critically probing dichotomies such as pastoral/urban and human/animal, the chapters show how literary fiction constructs, represents, and interprets experiences of same-sex love and attraction, traditionally conceived as “unnatural.” Providing in-depth studies of a variety of texts, this book demonstrates the merits of bridging the gap between the “de-naturalizing” project of gender and queer theory on the one hand, and, on the other, the ecocritical centering of material, nonhuman environments. Per Esben Svelstad is Associate Professor of Norwegian in the Department of Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.