Articulating Transgender Narratives

achel Carroll’s Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing is a critical addition to the expanding field of trans literary studies.1 Two other recent publications of note in this field are TransGothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Jolene Zigarovich, and a special issue of Victorian Review on “Trans Victorians” that I guest edited.2 Both of these works are quite specific in their respective focus on the gothic and the Victorian; by contrast, Carroll takes on a range of literary genres by British, Irish, and American authors published between 1918 and 2000 as well as contemporary films that reimagine some of these earlier narratives. As Carroll notes in the introduction, “A key concern for this study is the way in which transgender lives―whether historical or fictional―have been ‘authored by others’: named, defined and appropriated in ways which obscure, displace or erase transgender experiences, identities