Awards

• Winner of Shortlisted, Shakespeare's Globe Book Award Shortlisted, Shakespeare Association of America First Book Award.

Overview

The ""rogue,"" a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace and their seductive appeal emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction.Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of ""socio-sexual identity"" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality.With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called ""biopolitics,"" the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

Full Product Details

9780198967040

Table of Contents

Reviews

Shortlisted, Shakespeare's Globe Book Award Shortlisted, Shakespeare Association of America First Book Award In Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature, Ari Friedlander does more than tell the story of Renaissance rogues (the highwaymen, con artists and sex workers of Shakespeare's England). Through dazzling readings of early modern drama (as well as canting literature, works of early demography and Paradise Lost) he shows us a new way to study the history and culture of ourselves - and how our insatiable desires helped shape the identities we carry today. * Shakespeare's Globe Book Award Judges * Rogue Sexuality is original, compelling, and timely. It makes a crucial intervention in early modern sexuality studies by centering labor and class (both the representation of low status and the appropriation of it by elites), and by demonstrating how a Foucaultian biopolitics illuminates concerns about poverty, sexual reproduction, and social order in early modern England. It will change how we theorize the relationship between the social and the sexual in early modern texts. * Mario DiGangi, Professor of English, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York * This is a tightly argued, thorough and theoretically informed account of an important subject, which succeeds in analysing rogue sexuality across a dazzling array of contexts. It is an excellent work that makes valuable contributions to the study of sexuality and class in early modern England. * Ezra Horbury, Shakespeare Survey * Where do rogues come from? Thanks to Ari Friedlander's Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature, I now know a perfect phrase for characterizing the impulse animating this query. We may henceforth designate scholars who study Robert Greene's cony-catchers and Shakespeare's Autolycus as ""Rogue Curious,"" which is the witty title of the first chapter in this exciting book. [...] The book's final chapters model what literary scholarship inspired by rogue curiosity might look like. Because of them, Shakespeare's Perdita proves more Autolycus than I ever thought, and Milton's Edenic pair as much rogue spouses as companionate partners. Henceforth it will be hard for me to imagine them otherwise. * Vin Nardizzi, Shakespeare Quarterly * [A] welcome addition to the study of social forces that shape - and are shaped by - gender and sexuality in early modern English literature....[T]his learned and evocative study, would make for excellent reading in an undergraduate or graduate course on early modern gender and sexuality studies. * John Garrison, Renaissance Studies *

Author Information

Ari Friedlander is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His scholarship on sexuality, class, and disability in early modern English literature has been published in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, and other venues. His research has been supported by grants from the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Volkswagen Foundation.

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