Sexual types on the early modern stage are at once strange and familiar, associated with a range of unnatural or monstrous sexual and gender practices, yet familiar because readily identifiable as types: recognizable figures of literary imagination and social fantasy. From the many found in early modern culture, Mario DiGangi here focuses on six types that reveal in particularly compelling ways, both individually and collectively, how sexual transgressions were understood to intersect with social, gender, ecomic, and political transgressions. Building on feminist and queer scholarship, Sexual Types demonstrates how the sodomite, the tribade (a woman-loving woman), the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the court favorite function as sites of ideological contradiction in dramatic texts. On the one hand, these sexual types are vilified and disciplined for violating social and sexual rms; on the other hand, they can take the form of dynamic, resourceful characters who expose the limitations of the categories that attempt to define and contain them. In bringing sexuality and character studies into conjunction with one ather, Sexual Types provides illuminating new readings of familiar plays, such as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, and of lesser-kwn plays by Fletcher, Middleton, and Shirley.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN-10
0812243617
ISBN-13
9780812243611
eBay Product ID (ePID)
111472041
Product Key Features
Author
Mario Digangi
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
Literary Criticism
Dimensions
Weight
590g
Height
229mm
Width
152mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Pennsylvania
Spine
30mm
Content Note
30 Illus.
Author Biography
Mario DiGangi is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama.