Shakespeare's perfume
Subtitle: sodomy and sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan
By: Richard Halpern.
Series: New cultural studies
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Philadelphia, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 125
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- In literature; Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900; Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939; Lacan, Jacques, 1901-; Sonnets, English -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc; Psychoanalysis and literature -- Ireland; Psychoanalysis and literature -- England; Sublime, The, in literature; Sodomy in literature
Description: "Starting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual - and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art.

Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable that runs from Shakespeare's sonnets to Oscar Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W. H., Freud's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [117]-121) and index.
Series statement on jacket.
Table of contents: title: Shakespeare's perfume; title: Theory to die for : Oscar Wilde's The portrait of Mr. W.H.; title: Freud's Egyptian Renaissance : Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood; title: Lacan's anal thing : the ethics of psychoanalysis.