Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The chastity plot in Western culture is a huge subject, and this study is necessarily selective, though certainly wide-ranging. . . . During investigates the history of chastity for what it may be able to tell us about shifting moral codes and principles of integrity." * New York Review of Books *
"An intellectually ambitious and wide-ranging book." * Notches Blog *
"intelligent, lengthy, and ambitious" * Commonweal Magazine *
“A brilliant book. Long awaited, but worth its weight in gold. The writing is at all times limpid, and the fruit of deep reading and immense erudition. The theme is so compelling that after reading the book, I became entirely chaste. Highly recommended.” -- Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us
“With astonishing breadth, sophistication, and erudition,
The Chastity Plot spans from philosophy to literature and from Hollywood movies to Greek tragedy. With different global genealogies of chastity coming to the fore, investigating its grammar and place in Western culture is a crucial and timely endeavor. Rather than sanctifying chastity as source of perfection or dismissing it as source of oppression, During gives us the genealogy of the Western chastity plot in all of its complexity, ambivalences, and polyphonies.” -- Chiara Bottici, author of Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1 Is There a Chastity Plot?
Chapter 2 Virginity and Terror: Reading Hippolytus
Chapter 3 Marriage and Mayhem
Chapter 4 The Dangerous Mystique of Continence
Chapter 5 The Pure and the Impure: Pastoral and the Reversal of Nature
Chapter 6 A Virgin Enthroned: Power, Performance, and Poetry in the English Renaissance
Chapter 7 The Virgin’s Fall
Chapter 8 Losing the Plot: The Politics and Poetry of Modern Virginity
Notes
Index
