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2 books match the query 'Sex customs in literature'

cover of The Kinky Renaissance

The Kinky Renaissance

Edited by Gillian Knoll and Joseph Gamble

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2024

A provocative essay collection that theorizes the Renaissance through the lens of kink.

The Kinky Renaissance is a groundbreaking collection of essays that explore kink as a theoretical analytic, a historical formation, and an aesthetic mode. The essays in this work expand the sexual archive and its lexicon by introducing new vocabularies to familiar sexual scenes in early modern literature and culture and by bringing lesser-known scenes to bear on the study of sexuality in the period. Providing a capacious theory of sexuality and historical precedents for contemporary kinky practices, The Kinky Renaissance explores the erotic potential of early modern literature and pauses over various kinks nestled between and beside them. The collection boldly argues for a broader concept of a kinky Renaissance—one which reorients the terms of both the history of sexuality and queer theory more broadly.
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cover of Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Victorian Sexual Dissidence

Edited by Richard Dellamora

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today.

One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects.

This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies.

Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.
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