Renaissance Discourses Of Desire

Love and sex are preeminent subjects of Renaissance literature; however, attitudes toward these topics were hardly uniform. The discourses of desire from this period embrace works as dissimilar as sonnets on frustrated love and libertine invitations to lust. Writers both idealized and demystified sex, alternately equating it with religious transcendence or exposing it as a mere bodily itch. The fifteen essays in this volume clarify the sexual beliefs and prohibitions of the Renaissance period and examine the manifestations of those ideas in literature. Renaissance Discourses of Desire confronts important questions about the relationship of sexuality and textuality in the period using a variety of critical methods and ideological presuppositions. Some of the essays focus on the intertwining of political and sexual discourse, the difference between men and women as desiring subjects, and the erotics of criticism. The representation of homoerotics and homosexuality is discussed as is the impact of economic and social ideologies on love poetry and sexual expression. Among the texts explored are works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Carew, Herrick, Suckling, Burton, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Milton. With their varied approaches, these essays illustrate the richness of the topic and its susceptibility to a number of critical techniques. Illuminating important authors and significant texts, the essays collected here contribute to a fuller understanding of the complexities and range of seventeenth-century discourses of desire, while also helping to chart the outlines of the period's sexual ideologies and anxieties.

Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.

An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

As the twelve original essays collected in this volume demonstrate, to study the wit of seventeenth-century poetry is necessarily to address concerns at the very heart of the period's shifting literary culture. It is a topic that raises persistent questions of thematics and authorial intent, even as it interrogates a wide spectrum of cultural practices. These essays by some of the most renowned scholars in seventeenth-century studies illuminate important authors and engage issues of politics and religion, of secular and sacred love, of literary theory and poetic technique, of gender relations and historical consciousness, of literary history and social change, as well as larger concerns of literary production and smaller ones of local effects. Collectively, they illustrate the vitality of the topic, both in its own right and as a means of understanding the complexity and range of seventeenth-century English poetry.

Each chapter explores the interrelationships of representation, identification, and desire, while the book as a whole gradually shifts in emphasis from new historicist concerns with representation and the social realm toward psychoanalytic themes of identification, desire, and inwardness.

Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships among literature, religion, and politics in Renaissance England. Richard Mallette demonstrates how one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Edmund Spenser?s The Faerie Queene, reproduces, criticizes, parodies, and transforms the discourses of England during that remarkable political and literary era. ø According to Mallette, The Faerie Queene not only represents Reformation values but also challenges, questions, and frequently undermines Protestant assumptions. Building upon recent scholarship, particularly new historicism, Protestant poetics, feminism, and gender theory, this ambitious study traces The Faerie Queene?s linkage of religion to political and social realms. Mallette?s study expands traditional theological conceptions of Renaissance England, showing how the poem incorporates and transmutes religious discourses and thereby tests, appraises, and questions their avowals and assurances. The book?s focus on religious discourses leads Mallette to examine how such matters as marriage, gender, the body, revenge, sexuality, and foreign policy were represented?in both traditional and subversive ways?in Spenser?s influential masterpiece. ø A bold and finely argued contribution to our understanding of Spenser, Reformation thought, and Renaissance literature and society, Mallette?s study will add to the ongoing reassessment of England during this important period.

In the period 1450 to 1650 in Europe, hair was braided, curled, shaped, cut, colored, covered, decorated, supplemented, removed, and reused in magic, courtship, and art, amongst other things. On the body, Renaissance men and women often considered hair a signifier of order and civility. Hair style and the head coverings worn by many throughout the period marked not only the wearer's engagement with fashion, but also moral, religious, social, and political beliefs. Hair established individuals' positions in the period's social hierarchy and signified class, gender, and racial identities, as well as distinctions of age and marital and professional status. Such a meaningful part of the body, however, could also be disorderly, when it grew where it wasn't supposed to or transgressed the body's boundaries by being wild, uncovered, unpinned, or uncut. A natural material with cultural import, hair weaves together the Renaissance histories of fashion, politics, religion, gender, science, medicine, art, literature, and material culture. A necessarily interdisciplinary study, A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance explores the multiple meanings of hair, as well as the ideas and practices it inspired. Separate chapters contemplate Religion and Ritualized Belief, Self and Society, Fashion and Adornment, Production and Practice, Health and Hygiene, Sexuality and Gender, Race and Ethnicity, Class and Social Status, and Cultural Representations.