Yuma Public Library

A wide-ranging account of the significance of sodomy in the rich discourse of early modern England from 1590 to 1660. The author sets for a challenging reinterpretation of the historicity of homosexuality, reading a variety of Renaissance texts in the light of the work of such contemporary theorists as Foucault, Kristeva, Deleuze, Guattari, Hocquenghem, Derrida, and Althusser.

Unlike much of the scholarship that has reexamined issues of gender and sexuality in the Restoration and eighteenth century, this book is not concerned with tracing the emergence of a proto-modern "homosexual" identity. In The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, the central question is: Why did so many eighteenth-century writers represent the sodomite at all? What purposes did these representations serve? Charting the emergence of the sodomite as a social...