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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lanser, Susan S., 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.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (356 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

1. How to Do the Sexuality of History

2. Mapping Sapphic Modernity, 1565-1630

3. Fearful Symmetries: The Sapphic and the State, 1630-1749

4. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire, 1630-1765

5. Rereading the "Rise" of the Novel: Sapphic Genealogies, 1680-1815

6. Sapphic Sects and the Rites of Revolution, 1775-1800

7. "Sisters in Love": Irregular Families, Romantic Elegies, 1788-1830

Coda: We Have Always Been Modern

Notes

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

0-226-18773-X

0-226-18787-X

OCLC:

896873037