Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2020
Abstract
When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in ELR appeared in 1992 with Joseph Pequigney’s essay on Shakespeare’s two Antonios, followed by my own essay on non-Shakespearean satiric comedy in 1995.
Included in
Cultural History Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Theatre History Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in English Literary Renaissance, available at https://doi.org/10.1086/706215
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).