| Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama Contributor(s): Bromley, James M. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0198867824 ISBN-13: 9780198867821 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $79.80 Product Type: Hardcover Published: July 2021 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Renaissance - Literary Criticism | Drama - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory |
| Dewey: 820.935 |
| LCCN: 2020948785 |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6.4" W x 9.5" (1.15 lbs) 240 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy. |