Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England

Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England PDF

Author: Claude J Summers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1317972252

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This new book significantly contributes to an increased understanding of the gay and lesbian experience as it illuminates important works of literature and clarifies the status of same-sex desire in English literature from 1500--1760. Homosexual themes can be found throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Enlightenment, but only rarely are they direct and unambiguous. The essays here are engaged in a vital and necessary process of re-historicizing and re-contextualizing literature. Utilizing a variety of critical methods and proceeding from several different theoretical and ideological presuppositions, these essays raise important questions about the methodology of gay studies, about the conception of same-sex desire, about the depiction of homoerotics, and about the relationship of sexuality and textuality, even as they shed new light on the homosexual import of a number of significant works of literature. Among the authors studied are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, John Cleland, and Thomas Gray. The collection attests both the current intellectual ferment in gay studies and the richness of English Renaissance and eighteenth-century literary representations of homosexuality. Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England provides numerous insights into important works of literature and into significant theoretical issues implicit in the process of discerning and defining homosexuality in texts of earlier ages. All the contributors locate their texts in carefully delineated cultural and historical milieux. But they are not unduly constrained by either the tyranny of theory or the anxieties of anachronism. Rather than proceeding from hidebound or fashionably current ideologies, they sift the texts they study for the concrete evidence from which theories of sexuality might be constructed or modified. Hence, the collection will be valuable both for its practical criticism and for its theoretical contributions. It vividly illustrates the variety of gay studies in literature, especially as applied to works of earlier ages.

Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England

Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England PDF

Author: Claude J Summers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1317972260

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This new book significantly contributes to an increased understanding of the gay and lesbian experience as it illuminates important works of literature and clarifies the status of same-sex desire in English literature from 1500--1760. Homosexual themes can be found throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Enlightenment, but only rarely are they direct and unambiguous. The essays here are engaged in a vital and necessary process of re-historicizing and re-contextualizing literature. Utilizing a variety of critical methods and proceeding from several different theoretical and ideological presuppositions, these essays raise important questions about the methodology of gay studies, about the conception of same-sex desire, about the depiction of homoerotics, and about the relationship of sexuality and textuality, even as they shed new light on the homosexual import of a number of significant works of literature. Among the authors studied are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, John Cleland, and Thomas Gray. The collection attests both the current intellectual ferment in gay studies and the richness of English Renaissance and eighteenth-century literary representations of homosexuality. Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England provides numerous insights into important works of literature and into significant theoretical issues implicit in the process of discerning and defining homosexuality in texts of earlier ages. All the contributors locate their texts in carefully delineated cultural and historical milieux. But they are not unduly constrained by either the tyranny of theory or the anxieties of anachronism. Rather than proceeding from hidebound or fashionably current ideologies, they sift the texts they study for the concrete evidence from which theories of sexuality might be constructed or modified. Hence, the collection will be valuable both for its practical criticism and for its theoretical contributions. It vividly illustrates the variety of gay studies in literature, especially as applied to works of earlier ages.

Homosexuality in Renaissance England

Homosexuality in Renaissance England PDF

Author: Alan Bray

Publisher: London : Gay Men's Press

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13:

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Bray explores how men who engaged in sodomy reconciled this behavior with their society's violent loathing for the sodomite, and shows how a social more that had remained stable for centuries changed dramatically toward the end of the seventeenth century.

King James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality

King James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality PDF

Author: M. Young

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1999-09-22

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0230514898

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James VI and I was the most prominent homosexual figure in the early modern period. Young has amassed the evidence surrounding James and related it to the larger history of homosexuality. The result is a synthesis of old and new history that illuminates Jacobean politics and challenges many current assumptions about effeminacy, manliness, sodomy, sexual constructs and sexual discourse before the eighteenth century.

A History of Gay Literature

A History of Gay Literature PDF

Author: Gregory Woods

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9780300080889

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Account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. It traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas s Baghdad to David Leavitt s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.

Sodomy in Early Modern Europe

Sodomy in Early Modern Europe PDF

Author: Thomas Betteridge

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2002-10-11

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9780719061158

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Sodomy in Early Modern Europe is a collection of essays that reflect closely the main areas of debate within gay historiography. In particular, for the last twenty years scholars have questioned the nature of early modern sodomy. The contributors have responded to these questions in a number of different and often apparently contradictory ways, and the essays which make up this collection reflect this diversity of approach. The volume includes essays on sodomy in English Protestant history writing, and sodomy in Calvin’s Geneva and early modern Venice.

Gendered Memories

Gendered Memories PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-08

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9004484094

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How does gender shape memory? What role does literature play in cultural remembering? These are two of the questions to which the present volume is addressed. Even if we agree that remembering is not biologically determined, we can assume that memory is influenced by the particular social, cultural and historical conditions in which individuals find themselves. And since men and women generally assume different social and cultural roles, their way of remembering should also differ. So, do women and men remember different events, narrate different stories, and narrate or read them in different ways? Gendered Memories, then, not only looks at memory gendered by literature, but also wants to know how gender shapes the memory of literature.

Love between Men in English Literature

Love between Men in English Literature PDF

Author: Paul Hammond

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1996-11-12

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1349248991

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This is the first book to provide an account of the representation of emotional and sexual relationships between men across English literature from the Renaissance to the modern period. Based on new research but aimed at the student and the general reader, Paul Hammond discusses major writers such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, Tennyson and Wilde, Forster and Lawrence, but also introduces less familiar texts which cast light on the homosexual culture of their periods. There is an extensive bibliography.