Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context

by Summers; Claude J

• ISBN13: 9781560230199
• ISBN10: 1560230193
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1992-10-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
"Masculine Love," Renaissance Writing, and the "New Invention" of Homosexuality	p. 9
Tradition and the Individtial Sodomite: Barnfieid, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire	p. 41
Body, Costume, and Desire in Christopher Marlowe	p. 69
Verse Letters to T. W. from John Donne: "By You My Love Is Sent"	p. 85
Lesbian Erotics: The Utopian Trope of Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis"	p. 103
Sodomy and Kingcraft in Urania and Antony and Cleopatra	p. 135
Not Since Sappho: The Erotic in Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Belin	p. 153
Seeing Sodomy: Fanny Hill's Blinding Vision	p. 173
The Sodomitical Muse: Fanny Hill and the Rhetoric of Crossdressing	p. 185
"The Voice of Nature" in Gray's Elegy	p. 199
Index	p. 215
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.