Neil Bartlett: Invitations to Speculate

This book explores Neil Bartlett’s groundbreaking contributions to queer cultural production in the United Kingdom. It adopts a range of critical perspectives, presenting original scholarship on Bartlett’s fiction, theatre, performance, site-specific work, and adaptations, as well as more personal reflections on Bartlett’s influence and legacy. Charting his emergence as a radical queer artist in the 1970s, his writing for performance and theatre in the 1980s to the present day, and his evocative novels about queer spaces and hidden histories, the book considers Bartlett’s works as ‘invitations to speculate’: to view and imagine otherwise, as part of a political aesthetics committed to making queer lives visible. Bartlett’s bold, sensuous, and challenging work crosses genres to find new ways of articulating queer desires, unearthing histories of the body, pleasure, and gay subjectivity while connecting queer experiences across time. Dealing with topics including memory and loss, AIDS and its legacy, marginality, community, and identity, the collection shows how Bartlett embraces the past as a way of reimagining queer futures and demonstrates his status as one of the UK’s leading queer artists.