The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830

Awards:   Commended for Lambda Literary Awards (Studies) 2015
Author:   Susan S. Lanser
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226187563


Pages:   344
Publication Date:   01 December 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830


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Awards

  • Commended for Lambda Literary Awards (Studies) 2015

Overview

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in closeted texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Full Product Details

Author:   Susan S. Lanser
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 1.70cm , Height: 0.30cm , Length: 2.40cm
Weight:   0.680kg
ISBN:  

9780226187563


ISBN 10:   022618756
Pages:   344
Publication Date:   01 December 2014
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

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Reviews

The Sexuality of History is nothing short of astonishing. On the very title page it makes a claim that reverses everything we know about how sexuality has been historicized; and then, not only in its opening pages but also throughout this vast and powerful study, this enormous claim is proved. (George Haggerty, University of California, Riverside)


Author Information

Susan S. Lanser is professor of comparative literature, English, and women's and gender studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice and The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction.

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