Description
Book SynopsisArgues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. This book urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions.
Trade Review“Carla Freccero’s beautifully written book offers a strong, persuasive, and new way of reading queer early modern texts. Refusing the historicist view that would draw fierce lines between premodern and modern, Freccero asks her reader to consider premodern texts as intervening in the logic of their times and persisting within modernity in spectral form. Her intense engagement with queer early modern scholarship is enriched and disoriented by her insistence that contemporary practices of ‘queering’ are haunted by their unfinished and unfinishable past. Her singular and deft way of moving between contemporary culture and politics and the animated remnants of premodern texts offers a brilliant model for contemporary scholarship and a truly innovative turn in queer studies.”—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
“Had he lived in the sixteenth century, André Breton would have proclaimed: ‘Art will be queer or it will not be.’ Such is the enduring truth we obtain from Carla Freccero’s powerful, inventive, indeed genial readings of the early modern canon. A brilliant work showing us what we can do with what we call the past.”—Tom Conley, author of
The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France“
Queer/Early/Modern is an important and exciting contribution to the literature on representations of sexuality and subjectivity in early modern literature and culture. The book will be of interest to anyone who has been engaged in the project of ‘queering’ the Renaissance and beyond not simply as a way of finding precursors for modern lifestyles and identities but as a political gesture meant to resist essentialist critiques that attempt to simplify the complexity of (queer) identities by anchoring them in rigid notions of history. Freccero is not afraid to make bold claims, and she has the historical knowledge and theoretical prowess to support them convincingly.” -- David LaGuardia * Journal of the History of Sexuality *
“If the academy were a spa, then
Queer/Early/Modern would be its hot-rock massage. At once painful and invigorating, this brilliant book destroys heteronormative historiography with a force belied only by its exquisitely beautiful prose.” -- Madhavi Menon * GLQ *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments iv
1. Prolepses: Queer/Early/Modern 1
Part One. Past, Present
2. Always Already Queer (French) Theory 13
3. Undoing the Histories of Homosexuality 31
4. Queer Nation: Early/Modern France 51
Part Two. Futures
5. Queer Spectrality 69
Notes 105
Bibliography 149
Index 173
