The Sexuality of History : Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 / Susan S. Lanser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lanser, Susan Sniader, 1944- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lesbians in literature.

Lesbians' writings--History and criticism.

Lesbians' writings.

European literature--History and criticism.

European literature.

Lesbianism--Europe--History.

Lesbianism.

Lesbian feminism--Europe--History.

Lesbian feminism.

History.

Europe.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

345 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Summary:

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in "closeted" texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality. Book jacket.

Contents:

How to do the sexuality of history

Mapping sapphic modernity, 1565-1630

Fearful symmetries: the sapphic and the state, 1630-1749

The political economy of same-sex desire, 1630-1765

Rereading the "rise" of the novel: sapphic genealogies, 1680-1815

Sapphic sects and the rites of revolution, 1775-1800

"Sisters in love": irregular families, romantic elegies, 1788-1830

Coda: we have always been modern.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226187563

022618756X

9780226187730

022618773X

OCLC:

871670545