Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: D. Walen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 140398106X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This book explores representations of love and desire between female characters in nearly seventy plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. Writers place female characters in erotic situations with other female characters in playful scenarios of mistaken identity, in anxious moments of amorous intrigue, in predatory situations and in enthusiastic, utopian representations of romantic love. These plays indicate an awareness of female homoeroticism in early modern England and belie statements that literary evidence of homosexuality was concerned primarily with men.

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: D. Walen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 140398106X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This book explores representations of love and desire between female characters in nearly seventy plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. Writers place female characters in erotic situations with other female characters in playful scenarios of mistaken identity, in anxious moments of amorous intrigue, in predatory situations and in enthusiastic, utopian representations of romantic love. These plays indicate an awareness of female homoeroticism in early modern England and belie statements that literary evidence of homosexuality was concerned primarily with men.

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama

Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: D. Walen
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403968753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book explores representations of love and desire between female characters in nearly seventy plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. Writers place female characters in erotic situations with other female characters in playful scenarios of mistaken identity, in anxious moments of amorous intrigue, in predatory situations and in enthusiastic, utopian representations of romantic love. These plays indicate an awareness of female homoeroticism in early modern England and belie statements that literary evidence of homosexuality was concerned primarily with men.

Constructions of Female Homoerotics in Early Modern Drama

Constructions of Female Homoerotics in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Denise A. Walen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description


The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama

The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Mario DiGangi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521587013
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
DiGangi analyses the relation between homoeroticism and social power in a range of literary and historical texts from the 1580s to the 1620s, drawing on insights from materialist, queer and feminist theory to show the centrality of homoerotic practices.

Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature

Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Simone Chess
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317360869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature PDF Author: Jodie Medd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316453561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

Pure Wit

Pure Wit PDF Author: Francesca Peacock
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1639366040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A biography of the remarkable—and in her time scandalous—seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, who pioneered the science fiction novel. "My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world."—Margaret Cavendish Margaret Cavendish, then Lucas, was born in 1623 to an aristocratic family. In 1644, as England descended into civil war, she joined the court of the formidable Queen Henrietta Maria at Oxford. With the rest of the court she went into self-imposed exile in France. Her family's wealth and lands were forfeited by Parliament. It was in France that she met her partner, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a marriage that made her the Duchess of Newcastle and would remain at the heart of both her life and career. Margaret was a passionate writer. She wrote extensively on gender, science, philosophy, and published under her own name at a time when women simply did not do so. Her greatest work was The Blazing World, published in 1666, a utopian proto-novel that is thought to be one of the earliest works of science fiction that brought together Margaret's talents in poetry, philosophy, and science. Yet hers is a legacy that has long divided opinion, and history has largely forgotten her, an undeserved fate for a brilliant, courageous proto-feminist. In Pure Wit, Francesca Peacock remedies this omission and shines a spotlight on the fascinating, pioneering, yet often complex and controversial life, of the multi-faceted Margaret Cavendish.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment PDF Author: Valerie Traub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191019739
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Inseparable

Inseparable PDF Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307593614
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
From a writer of astonishing versatility and erudition, the much-admired literary critic, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar (“Dazzling”—The Washington Post; “One of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any time, any atmosphere, and make it her own” —The Observer), a book that explores the little-known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history. Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire. She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James. Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.” She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

Shakespeare Re-dressed

Shakespeare Re-dressed PDF Author: James C. Bulman
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838641149
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"This collection covers a wide range of Shakespeare productions, from Granville Barker and Poel's experiments with cross-gender casting to recent performances by Cheek by Jowl, the National Theatre, and the new Globe; from early twentieth-century performances by women's companies in England and Japan to contemporary stagings by the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company; from Mabou Mines' controversial Lear in New York to a more subtly transgressive Tempest by the Georgia Shakespeare Festival." "These essays are comprehensive in their consideration of cross-gender-cast Shakespeare as it evolved over the past century. Theoretically informed yet grounded in the particularity of individual performances, they forge new connections between performance studies and gender theory and broach issues vital to anyone interested in Shakespeare."--BOOK JACKET.