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Fifty years after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts, Jonathan Dollimore explores, in, through and beyond the gay sub-cultures of cities like New York, Brighton and Sydney, what the new freedoms meant for him and others in the following decades. He writes honestly and movingly about his teenage attraction to risk and danger; of accidents and escapes; of curiosity as a flight from boredom; of suicidal depression and ecstasy; and, beneath all, of the life of desire haunted and torn by loss. For more than thirty years Jonathan Dollimore has been one of contemporary culture's most influential critics of politics, literature, and sexuality. Desire: A Memoir, a hybrid of autobiography, meditation and philosophical reflection, explores the existential sources of his writing.
Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.
Returning to the early modern period, this study questions and develops issues of post-modernity. It shows how literature histories and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence may be relevant to current debates and discusses topics ranging from homophobia to transgression and its containment.
When it was first published, Radical Tragedy was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, Radical Tragedy remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama and a classic of cultural materialist criticism. The corrected and reissued third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a candid new Preface by the author and features a Foreword by Terry Eagleton.
Those who love and live by art, tell us that it is the most exalted expression of civilized life. In this provocative new book Jonathan Dollimore argues that, far from confirming humane values, literature more often than not violates them. He begins with a polemical and witty attack on the spurious radicalism of some fashionable academic theories about desire and sexual dissidence. Dollimore then examines the ways in which the media, literary critics and the state, as well as these literary theorists, all deny or repress the disturbing and dangerous knowledge conveyed by literature. His own account of the volatile connections between aesthetics, desire, politics and censorship unfolds throug...
Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why, in other words, is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history - history rather than human nature - which has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity. In the process it brilliantly links writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig. So Freud's theory of perversion is d...
Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann.
Although in recent years scholars have explored the cultural construction of masculinity, they have largely ignored the ways in which masculinity intersects with other categories of identity, particularly those of race and ethnicity. The essays in Race and the Subject of Masculinities address this concern and focus on the social construction of masculinity--black, white, ethnic, gay, and straight--in terms of the often complex and dynamic relationships among these inseparable categories. Discussing a wide range of subjects including the inherent homoeroticism of martial-arts cinema, the relationship between working-class ideologies and Elvis impersonators, the emergence of a gay, black mascu...