The Erotics Of Restraint

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas Glover’s new essay collection fuses his long experience as an author with his love of philosophy and his passion for form. Call it a new kind of criticism or an operator’s manual for readers and writers, The Erotics of Restraint extends Glover’s long and deeply personal conversation with great books and their authors. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his fiction, he dissects narrative and shows us how and why it works, why we love it, and how that makes us human. Erudite and obsessively detailed, inventive, confessional, and cheeky, these essays offer a brilliant clarity, a respite in an age of doubt. They raise the bar.

Restraint is a compilation of Erotic poems themed around Love, Passion, Pain, Torment, Lust, and Erotica. It is eloquently written and assured to take the reader on an emotional journey into the sensual mind of this author.

James Bromley argues that Renaissance texts circulate knowledge about a variety of non-standard sexual practices and intimate life narratives, including non-monogamy, anal eroticism, masochism and cross-racial female homoeroticism. Rethinking current assumptions about intimacy in Renaissance drama, poetry and prose, the book blends historicized and queer approaches to embodiment, narrative and temporality. An important contribution to Renaissance literary studies, queer theory and the history of sexuality, the book demonstrates the relevance of Renaissance literature to today. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 'problem comedies', Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton's The Nice Valour and Lady Mary Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and her prose romance The Urania, Bromley re-evaluates notions of the centrality of deep, abiding affection in Renaissance culture and challenges our own investment in a narrowly defined intimate sphere.

A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2012 “Glover is a master of narrative structure.” —Wall Street Journal In the tradition of E.M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence—and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live? Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover’s take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age. Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. Praise for Douglas Glover "So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker "Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly "A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail "Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's "Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune "Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

In The Erotics of War in German Romanticism, Patricia Anne Simpson explores the ways early nineteenth-century German philosophers, poets, and artists represent war and erotic desire. The author argues that gender is connected to a larger debate about the construction of the self in relation to a community at a time that this definition is under revision. She analyzes the culture of war as it shapes the bonds of fraternal, familial, and eventually national identity. Simpson defines the erotics of war as discursive attempts to assert the priority of ethical identity and citizenship over individualized desire. The seemingly ancillary problem of female desire emerges not as a marginal issue, but as the focal point of a debate about identity.

For centuries China has fueled the creative imagination and inspired fashion. This stunning publication explores the influence of Chinese art, film, and aesthetics on international fashion designers, including Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, and Yves Saint Laurent.

This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

Suffering in cinema can be crucial to how stars are cast in roles and perceived by audiences, whether it is performed on the screen or weathered in the form of scandal, heartbreak, disfiguration, or aging in an actor’s real life. In Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering, editors Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Colleen Glenn assemble thirteen scholars to consider fourteen stars whose careers have been defined by suffering on- or off-screen. Together, these essays question assumptions that an actor’s ability to project an enduring image—both symbolic and physical—is necessary for box-office success, demonstrating instead that disruptions often shape and direct the star image. Contributors in this collection examine a wide range of stars from the last seventy years. Some essays deal with actors who have transformed temporarily for a role, or permanently, through aging or accident, such as Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day-Lewis, Mickey Rourke, Charlize Theron, and Hilary Swank. Other essays consider stars’ attempts to conceal aspects of themselves from the public in order to maintain a palatable public image, including Rita Hayworth, Rock Hudson, and Michael Jackson. Some explore typecasting and audience expectations, noting how struggles with marriage, divorce, and aging intersect in the images of Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, and Harrison Ford. A final set considers Sissy Spacek, Julia Roberts, and Halle Berry as women who reconfigure negative press and restrictive gender and racial expectations to their advantage, managing public perceptions of suffering in ways that flummox their critics. Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering offers film buffs, students, and scholars a fresh take on casting, method acting, audience reception, and the tensions at play in our fascination with an actor’s dual role as private individual and cultural icon.