In this Book
- Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-iv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-10
- CHAPTER 1: Shakespeare's Perfume
- pp. 11-31
- Bibliography
- pp. 117-122
- Acknowledgments
- p. 127
Additional Information
ISBN
9780812202151
Related ISBN(s)
9780812236613
MARC Record
OCLC
966926226
Pages
134
Launched on MUSE
2017-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2002