Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. This item is unavailable.Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault

Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history-rather than human nature-that has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in Sexual Dissidence. Written by a leading critic in gender studies, this wide-ranging study returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, and in the process brilliantly link writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Andr� Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Jean Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. In so doing, Dollimore discovers that Freud's theory of perversion is more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve. A path-breaking book in a rapidly expanding field of literary and cultural study, Sexual Dissidence shows how the literature, histories, and subcultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

`a massive and authoritative contribution to the debate on cultural politics ... Every student should own and use a copy. More to the point, so should anyone who presumes to teach.'Gregory Woods, The Higher

`Dollimore's enquiries are rigorous and far-reaching ... This is fertile ground engagingly exposed, reclaiming desire from the clutches of political reaction and repressive mystification.'City Limits

`There is much to challenge and excite in this book ... an important contribution to lesbian and gay studies.'Roger Baker, Gay Times

`Dollimore's ability to interweave theory with careful textual readinggs is outstanding ... The range of references is superb - from 1960s Black Panthers, through Othello to Freud and Hegel ... a very accessible text.'Dr M. Humm, Co-ordinator of Women's Studies, Polytechnic of East London

`a substantial and ambitious book ... Much of this book's merit lies in its consideration of other people's work ... it is a book that needed to be written, requiring the courage to tackle several conventionally distinct fields of knowledge and interpretation.'Times Literary Supplement

`revelatory, intellectually stimulating, and thought-provoking.'Dr J. N. Worrall, Principal Lecturer, Department of Humanities, Middlesex Polytechnic

`This is a brilliant book - beautifully organized and lucid and extraordinarily original in its response to a variety of texts, and to the interconnections between them which it proposes.'Neil Corcoran, Senior Lecturer, Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield

`An excellent new perspective on the increasingly important borders between aesthetics and sexuality.'Richard Brown, Lecturer, Department of English, University of Leeds

`This is a thoughtful and challenging book, not only for its reappraisals of hoary academic controversies like the constructionist-essentialist standoff, but because of the many intriguing analytical formulations it propounds.'B. R. Burg, Social & Behavioral Sciences

'With its astonishing erudition - literary, theological and psychoanalytic - it provides a suitable founding text for the pioneering Master's degree in 'Sexual Dissidence' which its author, with Alan Sinfield, has introduced at Sussex University. It makes a new and major contribution to the study of gay and lesbian identities, whether conceived as 'truly perverse' or as 'perversely normal'.' Lynne Segal, Women: a cultural review, Vol. 3, No. 1. 1992