Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities - Softcover

Goldberg, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804720517 ISBN 13: 9780804720519

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1992

Synopsis

This is a book about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary - works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and others - it is framed by more recent political considerations. The book takes as axiomatic that Foucault's description of sodomy as 'that utterly confused category' which he assigned to historic regimes before the advent of sexuality, applies not only to Renaissance texts but to modern situations as well. The analyses of literary texts engage the most advanced work in contemporary literary criticism (that done by feminist and New Historicist critics) and propose a gay studies perspective that necessarily complicates and enriches the discussions of gender and history. Goldberg brings rigorous scholarship to bear on a powerful contemporary polemic about the ways in which a past that never was is used to justify the repression of gay sexuality today.

About this title

Review

Sodmetries revolutionized Renaissance Studies by insisting on asking questions about sexuality

where none had been asked before. Focussing on texts that span histories and literatures, Sodometries challenges us to think of sexuality as something surprising rather than knowable.

(―Madhavi Menon American University)

Any study of early modern sexual significance―or the historical range of possibilities for organizing it―must engage the exacting readings so keenly traced in Sodometries. (―Laurie Shannon Northwestern University)

A classic in queer theory and in new historicist accounts of the renaissance. (―Janet Halley Harvard University)

Sodometries is a stunning book: the complexity of its intelligence and the beauty of its stylistic accomplishments take one's breath away. (―Journal of the History of Sexuailty)

“Sodometries has decisively shaped work in the history of sexuality for the

last decade and remains a critical text for this developing field . . . Goldberg’s work is already a classic and has not been superceded.”

(―Karen Newman Brown University)

A groundbreaking and essential text for practicing and aspiring scholars of

the English Renaissance.

(―Daniel Juan Gil Texas Christian University)

One of the first studies to think theory and history together in the study of Renaissance sexuality, Sodometries remains a methodologically transformative book -- for literary studies and for the history of sexuality. (―Jeffrey Masten Northwestern University)

From the Back Cover

"At the very cutting edge of its field, an indispensable guide to the sexuality of the world that preceded our own"--Alan J. M. Bray
"Sodometries is a stunning book: the complexity of its intelligence and the beauty of its stylistic accomplishments take one's breath away."--Journal of the History of Sexuality

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804720517
• ISBN 13: 9780804720519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Goldberg Jonathon