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Sex before Sex

Figuring the Act in Early Modern England

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Sex before Sex

By: James M. Bromley, Will Stockton
Narrated by: Jim Pelletier
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About this listen

What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places? Sex before Sex makes clear that we cannot simply transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays. The contributors confront how our current critical assumptions about definitions of sex restrict our understanding of representations of sexuality in early modern England.

Drawing attention to overlooked forms of sexual activity in early modern culture, from anilingus and interspecies sex to "chin-chucking" and convivial drinking, Sex before Sex offers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, including Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Paradise Lost, the figure of Lucretia, and pornographic poetry, this collection queries what might constitute sex in the absence of a widely accepted definition and how a historicized concept of sex affects the kinds of arguments that can be made about early modern sexualities.

©2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks Europe Gender Studies Medieval Social Sciences Middle Ages Early Modern England

Critic reviews

"An absorbing read for anyone interested in the perceptions of sex and the sexual in Early Modern England and through the human continuum." ( Huffington Post UK)
" Sex before Sex engages questions about method and the future of queer studies. The determination of the authors to 'embrace the possibilities of the critics simultaneous anteriority and posteriority' to early modern sex makes this essential reading for early modernists, and I anticipate that it will inspire a good deal of scholarly work to come." ( Renaissance Quarterly)
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Too many long words whose meaning I would have to look up to understand to make this a feasible listen. Gave up after an hour

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