Queer People
Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Eds.)
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Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800 2007 This fascinating and diverse collection of essays concerns the lives and representations of homosexuals in the long eighteenth century. The collection addresses and seeks to move beyond the current critical division between essentialists and social constructionists, a division that bedevils the history of sexuality and fissures Queer Theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as theoretical approaches, the essays explore canonical and non-canonical literature, scurrilous pamphlets and court cases, music, religion and politics, consumer culture and sexual subcultures. Eighteenth-century life is depicted here in all its rich variety, from the scandals surrounding Queen Anne to the struggles of laboring-class poets, and from the famous - Defoe, Handel, Boswell, Burney, and the Duchess of Devonshire - to the obscure male frequenters of Mother Clap's Molly House or the anonymous female participants in the extraordinary story of The She-Wedding. |
About the editors:
Chris Mounsey worked for several years in theatre before an accident and four months' immobility, in which reading was the only possible occupation, led to an academic career. Degrees in Philosophy, Comparative Literature and English from the University of Warwick followed, and a doctorate on Blake founded an interest in literature of the eighteenth century. Dr. Mounsey, who now teaches at the University of Winchester, is author of Christopher Smart: Clown of God and editor of Presenting Gender and Queer People. He is also author of Understanding the Poetry of William Blake through a Dialectic of Contraries (2011) and Being the Body of Christ.
Caroline Gonda is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. She is the author of Reading Daughters' Fictions, 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (1996).
