What exactly would queer literary history look like? This article argues that focusing on identities and their representations in literature is not a productive method, as a wide variety of queer impulses in literature – nearly all queer features that cannot be read as constituents of an identity of a human-like character in a story – would remain unrecognized. It then suggests that literature should not be approached as representation but rather as figuration. In figurative reading, a referent is not understood as determining a literary figure: a figure is made of language and used in a fictive work for particular purposes. The suggestion made here is that the concepts of prefiguration and fulfilment from Hayden White’s reading of Erich Auerbach might prove useful in thinking of how the present (scholar) and the past (text) relate to each other.

Furthermore, drawing from the tradition of deconstructive queer criticism, the article shows through readings of three texts by three Finnish authors form the 1910s that the queer is present often at the moment when the norm and normative tries to present itself as self-identitical and universal. This is true of marginal as well as canonical texts, and to demonstrate how queer reading is not solely about studying the marginal – even if many interesting texts can be found just there – the examples are taken from very different texts, ranging from a forgotten Christian novel to a novel set in Paris by one of the most heavily canonized Finnish authors of all times, Eino Leino.