Erotic subjects
Subtitle: the sexuality of politics in early modern English literature
By: Melissa E. Sanchez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
ISBN-13: 9780199754755
Description: "Sympathetic and imaginative, this elegantly written book illuminates the interrelation of eros and politics in ways that are refreshingly honest about the risky but real pleasure of submission to power. Sanchez traces the implications of such pleasure for Renaissance texts by both men and women with a subtlety that makes submitting to Erotic Subjects an unambiguous delight." --Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College --

"This is an accomplished and professional piece of work. Erotic Subjects shows how early modern works overtly concerned with love and desire are in fact fraught with reflection upon contemporary politics, as the relations of wooer and wooed, whether compliant or resistant, allegorize the relations between ruler and ruled. Sanchez writes fluently and engagingly, dealing in complex concepts and their nuances while taking her reader with her." -- Helen Hackett, University College London --

"That the personal is political has been a truism since the feminist movement of the 1970s. That the political might equally be personal is no less true, but until Sanchez, no one has leveraged this insight to analyze political thinking in Renaissance literature. Sanchez's feminist reading of political attachment is thoroughly informed by a queer theory made perversely and elegantly relevant to a broad range of early modern writers." --Valerie Traub, University of Michigan -- Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Erotic subjects in English history; title: "She therein ruling": hagiographic politics in the Countess of Pembroke's arcadia; title: "Who can loue the worker of her smart?": tyrannous seduction in The faerie queene; title: "Accessory yieldings":  consent without agency in The rape of Lucrece and Pericles; title: "Love, thou dost master me": political masochism in Mary Wroth's Urania; title: "It is consent that makes a perfect slave": love and liberty in the Caroline Masque; title: "Honest Margaret Newcastle":  law and desire in Margaret Cavendish's romances; title: "My self/before me": the erotics of republicanism in Paradise lost; title: "Lives there who loves his pain?".