This talk will explore the relationship between 19th-century Sapphic literature from France and 20th-century US lesbian pulp fiction. Connections between these corpuses, one canonical and the other low-brow, reveal that representations of sexual minorities travelled transnationally and had an undeniable impact on disparate communities well before globalization and the information age. Reading pulp fiction through the lens of earlier male-authored Sapphic texts confirms their significance for distant and unintended readers: women in search of mirrors for emerging identities.
