Addresses theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory and in early modern studies by reading early and late modern texts, archival materials, and contemporary popular works
Acknowledgments iv
1. Prolepses: Queer/Early/Modern 1
Part One. Past, Present
2. Always Already Queer (French) Theory 13
3. Undoing the Histories of Homosexuality 31
4. Queer Nation: Early/Modern France 51
Part Two. Futures
5. Queer Spectrality 69
Notes 105
Bibliography 149
Index 173
Carla Freccero is Chair of the Department of Literature and Professor of Literature, History of Consciousness, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Popular Culture: An Introduction and Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais and a coeditor of Premodern Sexualities.
"Had he lived in the sixteenth century, Andre Breton would have proclaimed: 'Art will be queer or it will not be.' Such is the enduring truth we obtain from Carla Freccero's powerful, inventive, indeed genial readings of the early modern canon. A brilliant work showing us what we can do with what we call the past."--Tom Conley, author of The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France "Carla Freccero's beautifully written book offers a strong, persuasive, and new way of reading queer early modern texts. Refusing the historicist view that would draw fierce lines between premodern and modern, Freccero asks her reader to consider premodern texts as intervening in the logic of their times and persisting within modernity in spectral form. Her intense engagement with queer early modern scholarship is enriched and disoriented by her insistence that contemporary practices of 'queering' are haunted by their unfinished and unfinishable past. Her singular and deft way of moving between contemporary culture and politics and the animated remnants of premodern texts offers a brilliant model for contemporary scholarship and a truly innovative turn in queer studies."--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley "For scholars working on gender in early modern texts, this book is both a useful synthesis of some of the most significant texts in postmodern-gender-queer theory and an original use of these texts to elaborate subtle, complex, and flexible readings of early modern texts... The questions Freccero raises and the arguments she offers open the door to more careful and inclusive readings of long-neglected texts that haunt our own culture, and to a radical revision of our attitudes towards the past."--Kathleen Long, Renaissance Quarterly "Carla Freccero's Queer/ Early/ Modern is an intensely engaged and elegantly written meta-commentary on the practice of reading the past, punctuated by passionate close readings of early modern French and Italian literary texts." --Graham Hammill, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
