Read more
A wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, linking writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig.
List of contents
- Introduction to Second Edition
- Part 1. An Encounter
- 1: Wilde and Gide in Algiers
- Part 2. Perspectives
- 2: Some Parameters
- Part 3. Subjectivity, Transgression, and Deviant Desire
- 3: Becoming Authentic
- 4: Wilde's Transgressive Aesthetic and Contemporary Cultural Politics
- 5: Re-encounters
- Part 4. Transgression and its Containment
- 6: The Politics of Containment
- 7: Tragedy and Containment
- Part 5. Perversion's Lost Histories
- 8: Towards the Paradoxical Perverse and the Perverse Dynamic
- 9: Augustine: Perversion and Privation
- 10: Othello: Sexual Difference and Internal Deviation
- Part 6. Sexual: Perversion Pathology to Politics
- 11: Freud's Theory of Sexual Perversion
- 12: Deconstructing Freud
- 13: From the Polymorphous Perverse to the Perverse Dynamic
- 14: Perversion, Power, and Social Control
- 15: Thinking the Perverse Dynamic
- Part 7. Beleaguered Norms and Perverse Dynamics
- 16: Homophobia (1): Sexual/ Political Deviance
- 17: Homophobia (2): Theories of Sexual Difference
- Part 8. Transgressive Reinscriptions, Early Modern and Post-modern
- 18: Subjectivity and Transgression
- 19: Early Modern: Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England
- 20: Post/modern: On the Gay Sensibility of the Pervert's Revenge on Authenticity: Wilde, Genet, Orton, and Others
- Part 9. Beyond Sexual Difference
- 21: Desire and Difference
- Afterword
About the author
Jonathan Dollimore pioneered cultural materialism; then he pioneered gay studies. He subsequently turned his attention to a fresh interrogation of those dark, recalcitrant elements of desire and mortality which resist utopian transformation. His influential books include Radical Tragedy (1984), Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1998), Sex Literature and Censorship (2001) and, with Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare (1985). Dollimore's most recent, path-breaking intervention is the powerfully personal Desire: a Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2017). Dollimore has held professorships at the Universities of Sussex and York, and he has lectured and taught throughout the world.
Summary
A wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, linking writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig.
