Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault - Softcover

Dollimore, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198112696 ISBN 13: 9780198112693

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history--rather than human nature--that has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in Sexual Dissidence.
Written by a leading critic in gender studies, this wide-ranging study returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, and in the process brilliantly link writers as diverse as Shakespeare, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Jean Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. In so doing, Dollimore discovers that Freud's theory of perversion is more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve.
A path-breaking book in a rapidly expanding field of literary and cultural study, Sexual Dissidence shows how the literature, histories, and subcultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Dollimore is at University of Sussex.

Review:

"Appears well placed to make an influential intervention in cultural theory on both sides of the Atlantic....A carefully argued, thought-provoking book that makes fascinating connections among different kinds of discourse while carrying an affective punch far beyond the academic routine."--Modern Language Quarterly

"Dollimore's amazing command of Western literary culture is evident in the historical and disciplinary sweep of his book."--Signs

"This is a thoughtful and challenging book, not only for its reappraisals of hoary academic controversies like the constructionist-essentialist standoff, but because of the many intriguing analytical formulations it propounds."--Choice

"A massive and authoritative contribution to the debate on cultural politics....Every student should own and use a copy. More to the point, so should anyone who presumes to teach."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"A substantial and ambitious book....It is a book that needed to be written, requiring the courage to tackle several conventionally distinct fields of knowledge and interpretation."--Times Literary Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0198112696
• ISBN 13: 9780198112693
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400