SoSe 17: PS-Surveying English Literatures II: Early Modern Texts and Sexualities
Zoe Sutherland
Comments
Early Modern or Renaissance literature was traditionally known for re-birthing the concept of the individual. Yet who is this individual? We will address this question by focusing on early modern English literature’s representations of male homosexual and lesbian desire, its classically-inflected erotics of reading and writing, and misogynist norms, as well as the revered status of male friendship, stories of virgins, amazons, tribades and sodomites, and changing attitudes towards celibacy and marriage. We will study why the English had boys play women on stage, and how views about bodies translated to the ways individuals saw themselves. Moreover, we will address how our own societies’ understandings of gender and history affect how we read early modern texts and sexualities.
Texts: Students should purchase and read Gallathea [c. 1588] in Gallathea and Midas ed. Anne B. Lancashire (Regents Renaissance Drama, 1969); William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will [1601-2] eds. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008); Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman [1609] ed. R. Holdsworth (New Mermaids, 2002).
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Regular appointments