Title: Shakespeare's perfume
First published: 2002
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.
Subjects: English Sonnets, History and criticism, In literature, Psychoanalysis and literature, Sodomy in literature, Sonnets, English, Sublime, The, in literature, Theory, Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, sonnets, Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, in literature, Sonnets, history and criticism, LGBTQ literary criticism
Places: England, Ireland
People: Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
LC classification: PR2848 .H25 2002