Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
Price: $39.95
Pages: 134
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication Date:
29 January 2016
ISBN: 9780812202151
Format: eBook
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare, Literary theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / General
"A witty, provocative, and timely book . . . that takes much current discussion of gender, aesthetics, and sexuality one step further."
Richard Halpern is the author of Shakespeare Among the Moderns. He is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Introduction
Chapter 1. Shakespeare's Perfume
Chapter 2. Theory to Die For: Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H.
Chapter 3. Freud's Egyptian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
Chapter 4. Lacan's Anal Thing: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments