Gail Kern Paster
Brilliantly employing the insights of Freudian, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in a series of close textual readings, Marshall demonstrates the early modern self's desire for self-dissolution in the rough textual pleasures of jouissance and connects that desire with contemporary interest in the ethics of pornography and other violent forms of spectatorship. This is a study of major importance to which I will turn again and again.
Gail Kern Paster, George Washington University, Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly
Bob J. Barker
Scholarly, wonderfully wise, detailed and painful.
Jonathan V. Crewe
Cynthia Marshall's brilliant and challenging book investigates the perverse pleasure catered by some of the most violent texts of the early modern period. At once deploying and strongly taking issue with mainstream New Historicism, Marshall provokes wide-ranging reconsideration of the dynamics of early modern literary production and audience-response.
Jonathan V. Crewe, Dartmouth College
From the Publisher
Brilliantly employing the insights of Freudian, Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis in a series of close textual readings, Marshall demonstrates the early modern self's desire for self-dissolution in the rough textual pleasures of jouissance and connects that desire with contemporary interest in the ethics of pornography and other violent forms of spectatorship. This is a study of major importance to which I will turn again and again.—Gail Kern Paster, George Washington University, Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly
Cynthia Marshall's brilliant and challenging book investigates the perverse pleasure catered by some of the most violent texts of the early modern period. At once deploying and strongly taking issue with mainstream New Historicism, Marshall provokes wide-ranging reconsideration of the dynamics of early modern literary production and audience-response.—Jonathan V. Crewe, Dartmouth College
Scholarly, wonderfully wise, detailed and painful.—Bob J. Barker