Sex in Literature

Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations generally. He also pays special attention to the work of Samuel Beckett, reading the novels Watt and The Lost Ones to explore the issues of power and domination in an Irish cultural context. For all of the texts read, such issues are explored in terms not only of content but of style and form. What is distinctive about many modern texts, Booker claims, is the reflexive way literary meditations on power, authority, and domination turn inward to involve examinations of textuality and reading as images of the kinds of struggles for mastery that inform society at large. Booker suggests that literary knowledge is of a different order than the traditional theoretical knowledge that is equated with power in the West. "Literature has the potential to explore and illuminate objects of inquiry in a mode of dialogue and performance rather than by seeking to dominate them in the traditional mode of science", he writes. "Especially in the difficult and complex texts of modern literature, successful reading requires that readers and texts work together, pointing toward ways the human drive for mastery can be fulfilled through cooperation rather than through demanding the submission of some Other who is being mastered or dominated".

This book establishes the range of meanings bestowed on the love deities through the later Middle Ages, and draws on feminist and cultural theories to offer new models for interpreting both academic Latin discourses and vernacular poetry.

This original study reevaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them that are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos' analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, gender categories, and the relation between errant sexuality and literary "mistakes."

Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter.

Noteworthy for its historical detail and intellectual incisiveness, this study establishes Milton as a monumental but divided figure--torn between radical and conservative mentalities, between eroticism and hatred of the flesh, and between patriarchal and egalitarian conceptions of Paradisal marriage.