Using queer theory to untangle all types of nonnormative sexual identities, Tison Pugh uses Chaucer’s work to expose the ongoing tension in the Middle Ages between an erotic culture that glorified love as an ennobling passion and an anti-erotic religious and philosophical tradition that denigrated love and (perhaps especially) its enactments. Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages considers the many ways in which anti-eroticisms complicate the conventional image of Chaucer. With chapters addressing such topics as mutual masochism, homosocial brotherhood, necrotic erotics, queer families, and the eroticisms of Chaucer’s God, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms will forever change the way readers see the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other masterpieces.   For Chaucer, erotic pursuits establish the thrust and tenor of many of his narratives, as they also expose the frustrations inherent in pursuing desires frowned upon by the religious foundations of Western medieval culture. One cannot love freely within an ideological framework that polices sexuality and privileges the anti-erotic Christian ideals of virginity and chastity, yet loving queerly creates escapes from social structures inimical to amour and its expressions in the medieval period. Thus Chaucer is not just England’s foundational love poet, he is also England’s foundational queer poet.

Product Description: Nabokov gained international fame with Lolita, a highly erotic and morally disturbing novel. Through its comprehensive study of the amorous and sexual behaviors of Nabokov's characters this book shows how Eros, both as a clown or a pervert, contributes to the poetic excellence of his novels and accounts for the unfolding of the plots...read more

Product Description: One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years...read more

Product Description: Taking cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the volume’s subject, this exciting collection of essays offers a reassessment of Shakespeare’s erotic and Ovidian mythology within classical and continental aesthetic contexts...read more

Product Description: This volume explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in the work of a range of major European modernists (including Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Mann, Proust and Rilke) as well as in that of some less-well-known figures of the period such as Dujardin and Jahnn...read more

Product Description: The Passionate Statesman explores the intersection of passion and politics in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, with special emphasis on how he represents the influence of eros, or erotic desire, on the careers of some of the most prominent statesmen from Greco-Roman antiquity...read more

Product Description: Drawing on queer theory, this study locates unorthodox desire in Henry James with a special focus on his two most deliberately queer novels, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. Jacob Jacobson shows how queer desire in these texts is exploited beyond the personal to solicit pawns for subversive causes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: “An extraordinary panorama of women’s lives today.”—The New York Times Book Review In detailed, revealing portraits of women from their teens through their sixties, Maggie Scarf explores the core experiences of women’s lives and discovers what can happen when the days and years scurry by, leaving unfinished the tasks that transform us from child to girl to woman...read more