Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star: A Tale of Psychopathology in a Neo-Romantic Setting
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star: A Tale of Psychopathology in a Neo-Romantic Setting

Summary/Abstract: Alan Hollinghurst’s 1994 novel The Folding Star tells the story of a gay man who develops an obsessive fascination with his seventeen-year-old student. The first-person narrativefocuses on the protagonist’s emotional suffering: he gradually succumbs to masochisticand sadistic impulses and nurtures a melancholic condition which eventually leads to his failure and the permanent loss of his object of desire. The aim of this article is to read Hollinghurst’s novel as a study of an emotional disorder, using the conceptual tools provided by psychoanalysis, a method born at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The Folding Starrecreates a Fin de siècle aura, and exploits the then established links between homosexuality, psychopathology, oversensitivity and aestheticism. With this novel, Hollinghurst investigates and mocks conventions and stereotypes related both to modernism and to homosexuality.

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