Sexuality of History
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€94.99
A01=Susan S. Lanser
Author_Susan S. Lanser
authority
british
Category=JBSJ
Category=NHD
change
cross dressing
culture
desire
deviance
difference
drama
duty
england
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotics
europe
family
france
friendship
gender
governance
history
holland
homosexuality
intimacy
lesbians
lgbt
lgbtq
lgbtqia
liberty
literature
love
mobility
nonfiction
order
passion
performance
play
poetry
power
queer
resistance
revolution
rise of the novel
romance
sappho
sexuality
stage
theater
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226187563
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 pundits were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser demonstrates 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, and 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.
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.
