This paper is a comparative cross-gender inquiry into representations of sexuality in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and P. J. Parker's Roxelana & Suleyman, since the body, as a constitutive part of social identity and a main site for the economy of pleasure and desire, is simultaneously inscribed in the economy of discourse, domination, and power. While both authors, in representing same-sex desire, borrow from a sizeable storehouse of Victorian literature by employing plots and themes from the

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... sation novel, the Gothic mode, melodrama, mystery fiction, romance, and pornography, within the framework of historical narrative, they diverge considerably in their textual strategies. Parker draws on the erotic charge of Orientalist fantasies, adopting them as s trans-historical constant, whereas Waters explores sexuality and its articulations by re-imagining the nineteenth century and representing the diverse investments of contemporaneity in historical rememoration, revision, and reconstruction.