Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible

by Celia R. Daileader

Overview

Celia Daileader explores the paradoxes of eroticism in early modern English drama, where women and their bodies (represented by boy actors) were materially absent and yet symbolically central. Accounting for the significance of the space offstage, where most sexual acts take place, Daileader looks to the suppression of religious drama in England and the resulting secularization of the stage. She draws together questions about sexuality and the sacred, in the bodies—of Christ and of woman—banished from the early modern English stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521034678
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture , #30
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.39(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; 1. Entrances: sex, women, God; 2. Offstage sex and female desire; 3. Body beneath/body beyond; 4. (Off)Staging the sacred; 5. Obscene and unseen; 6. Ejaculations and conclusions: toward an erotic theoretics; Appendices; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"For collections supporting work at graduate and research levels." Choice

"The author is to be commended for the clarity and lucidity of her writing, even though she makes large use of Foucault and Derrida. This is the thirtieth volume in Cambrige studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Stephen Orgel, a new historicist and cultural studies series that has strinkingly original and impressive contributions." Shakeshare Bulletin

From the Publisher