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Relatively late manifestations of the European philhellene revival of Greco-Roman letters presented to readers complex, extended prose fiction in which the trials of love mask an implicit moral and political allegory. Inevitably, coming during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, this cultural phenomenon was not without its religious and political dimensions. Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus were the three principal English exponents of rhetorically conscious Greco-Roman erotic romance. This book enhances the understanding of the erotic romances of Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth by setting them within an integrated political, rhetorical, and aesthetic context. It investigates how Renaissance translators alter rhetorical styles, and even contents, to accord with contemporary taste, political agendas and the restrictions of censorship. Particular attention is paid to differences between the French courtly style of Jacques Amyot and François de Belleforest and the more literal translations of their English counterparts. Valuable perspective on the early translations is offered through the modern English versions in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The book considers the three texts of Sidney's Arcadia, as a political romance sharing many of the thematic and rhetorical concerns of the ancients. It focuses on a narrow range of Shakespeare's plays including Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The book identifies Mary Sidney Wroth's masque-like prose allegory, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, as philhellene Protestant political propaganda.
Greco-Roman Romance of the Second Sophistic and the Renaissance Erotic romance, Middle Eastern in its provincial origins but European in its flavour, achieved a spectacular flourishing between 1579 and 1626 in the writings of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Mary Sidney Wroth (1587–1651/53). The
Erotics of the body politic Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) The film Rang Rasiya (Colours of Passion, 2008) based on the life of Ravi Varma situates the Pauranik tale of Urvashi and Pururavas at the heart of the narrative to tell the story not only of star-crossed lovers but of the proscriptions of the naked body. The Pauranik version told the story of the heavenly nymph Urvashi who could marry the mortal Pururavas only under the condition that
, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights could confidently expect audiences to read ‘Thebes’ as a signifier of a forthcoming political allegory on usurpation, tyranny and heroic resistance. While Sidney’s work on Arcadia is compressed between 1577 and 1584, Shakespeare’s response to European erotic romance manifests itself over roughly twenty-five years
10 Performing sex in Spanish erotic films of the 1980s Alejandro Melero Spanish films are known for their graphic representation of nudity and sex. While Pedro Almodóvar, Julio Medem and Bigas Luna are most widely known for screening sex, it in fact has a longer tradition in Spanish cinema. From the first illegal pornographic films of the silent era, to the so-called destape [uncovering] trend of the 1970s, Spanish cinema has found many ways to explore the representation of sexual acts. However, the contemporary success of Porn Studies in Anglophone academia has
3 Kate O’Brien and the erotics of liberal Catholic dissent As Gerardine Meaney observes, Kate O’Brien’s work demands to be read as ‘simultaneously but distinctly Irish, modernist and feminist’.1 O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) are part of the European tradition of the female Bildungsroman demarcated by Elizabeth Abel and her co-editors, and, specifically, an early twentiethcentury modernist variation of that genre.2 We might note, for instance, that Mary Lavelle begins with its eponymous heroine travelling on a train to Spain, just as
ch a pt e r 9 Literature: Representing Female Same-Sex Erotic Relationships and Desires Literature: Female Desiderius Erasmus (?1466–1536), humanist scholar Erasmus’s major works are Adages (a collection of sententiae or wise sayings or maxims (1500)), the Enchiridion (a manual of Christian living (1503)), The Praise of Folly (a satire of contemporary European social and religious attitudes (1511)) and Colloquies (Latin dialogues on various social, moral, and religious topics (1518/19)). His Scriptural commentaries and editions of classical writers and the
ch a pt e r 8 Literature: Representing Male Same-Sex Erotic Relationships and Desires Literature: Male Edmund Spenser (?1552–99), poet Educated at Cambridge, where he met his dear friend and mentor Gabriel Harvey, Spenser later became the Earl of Leicester’s secretary, and gained the support and patronage of Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Philip Sidney. Spenser’s works include the immediately popular Shepheardes Calender (1579); the sonnet sequence Amoretti and marriage poem Epithalamion (both 1595); the mythopoetic allegory of Tudor court life Colin Clouts Come
This essay explores Black queer feminist readings of the sexual politics of James Baldwin’s Another Country. Recent work at the intersection of queer of color critique and Black feminism allows us to newly appreciate Baldwin’s prescient theorization of the workings of racialized and gendered power within the erotic. Previous interpretations of Another Country have focused on what is perceived as a liberal idealization of white gay male intimacy. I argue that this approach requires a selective reading of the novel that occludes its more complex portrayal of a web of racially fraught, power-stricken, and often violent sexual relationships. When we de-prioritize white gay male eroticism and pursue analyses of a broader range of erotic scenes, a different vision of Baldwin’s sexual imaginary emerges. I argue that far from idealizing, Another Country presents sex within a racist, homophobic, and sexist world to be a messy terrain of pleasure, pain, and political urgency. An unsettling vision, to be sure, but one that, if we as readers are to seek more equitable erotic imaginaries, must be reckoned with.
Shot in a blue washed monochrome, the city of Tsukamoto Shinya‘s A Snake of June, stages a number of highly mediated sadomasochistic sexual encounters within its public spaces. This article examines how the forms of mediation offered within the narrative by both architecture and technology as well as the mediation offered by the film‘s extraordinary blueness articulates the intimate relationship between sexuality and modernity. Following on from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it combines a phenomenological and dialectical approach to develop an analysis of sexual pleasure and sexual politics which can account for the embodied interaction of urban subjects and urban spaces.