Reclaiming Sodom

Reclaiming Sodom explores alternatives to thes force of the Sodomitic biblical narrative in Islamic, non-western, and western traditions, and discusses the ways in which sodomy calls into question normative definitions of sexuality and gender. The collection pursues the "pleasures and dangers" of these alternatives, and takes on Proust's refusal to imagine a social movement founded on the "stigma" of Sodom.

Self-Help

Goldberg, Jonathan

Routledge

First published in 1986, this title examines a set of English Renaissance texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, Marvell and Milton, within the theoretic framework of postmodern thought. Following an opening chapter that argues for the value of this conjunction as a way of understanding literary history, subsequent chapters draw upon Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of photocentrism and Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the agency of the letter to offer fully theorized readings. Throughout, there is a sustained concern with the transformations of such Ovidian figures as Narcissus and Echo, Perseus and Medusa, Orpheus and Eurydice, and with the echo effects of Virgilian pastoral, as paradigms for the interplay of voice and writing.

Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

METHUEN

Routledge& Kegan Paul

James I and the Politics of Literature (Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries)

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

James I and the Politics of Literature

Excerpt from the Preface: This is a study of the relationships between authority and its representations in the Jacobean period. As the prime example of the representation of authority, James I is a central figure in this investigation. Representation does not have only a political meaning, however, and in the course of the work I consider the writings of James I, his poetry as well as his political treatises and speeches; literature produced for the court, most notably Ben Jonson's masques; representations that were not necessarily directed to the royal view - plays for the public stage by Chapman, Massinger Jonson, and Shakespeare, as well as poems and prose by Donne and Jonson. Visual representations that bear on public concerns are crucial, too, and I have taken as an important instance the genre of family portraits in the period.

British & Irish

Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance

Reference

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.

Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities

Stanford Univ Pr

Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples

In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women. The book is in three parts. The first part begins by pursuing linkages between feminine virtue and the canonical status of texts written by women of the period. It then confronts some received opinions and opens up new possibilities of evaluation through readings of Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and poems, plays, and fiction by Aphra Behn. The second part studies translation as an allowed (and therefore potentially devalued) sphere for women's writing, and offers accounts of Margaret Roper's translation of Erasmus and Mary Sidney's of Petrarch to show ways in which such work makes a central claim in Renaissance culture. In the third part, the author explores the thematics and practices of writing as exemplified in the women's hands in an early Tudor manuscript and through the character of Graphina in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam. Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the "debasement" of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn. The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreation―desires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Roper's Devout Treatise.

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Books by Goldberg, Jonathan