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A novelization of the life of the 16th Century playwright, Christopher Marlowe, portraying him as a spy for Elizabeth I's government in its war with Catholics. Lots of color on Elizabethan London, the court, the intrigues, the theater, the slums. The author's last book before his death, it comes 30 years after his Nothing Like the Sun, a novel on Shakespeare.
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Description
"Writing from within the gay movement, Alan Bray reclaims a chapter in the buried history of homosexuality. In so doing, he explores a crucial period in the evolution of English society from a new and revealing angle. His approach is distinct both from the traditional catalogue of homosexual celebrities, and from those historians for whom homosexuality has only a marginal significance. Alan Bray's concern is with the changing ways homosexuality was...
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"The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history. Born of...
Author
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This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary-works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others-it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed 'homosexual sodomy' and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq.The book...
Description
10 essays discussing the problems of discerning and defining homosexuality in texts of earlier ages. The difficulty arises from historical pressures against writing opening about same-sex emotions and relationships. A comparison of the language of the literary piece to the vocabulary of the era is often analyzed.
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"Virginia Woolf's Orlando, 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature,' playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning thee centuries of boisterous, fantastic adventure, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces experiences with first love as England, under James I, lies locked...
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Has any other love story become so enmeshed in our culture as the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet? In fair Verona the families of Montague and Capulet are locked in a long-standing, bitter blood feud when young Romeo Montague slips into a masquerade party at the Capulet's. During the dance he glimpses Juliet, the daughter of the house, and is struck by love at first sight. She returns his passion and they promise each other everlasting love notwithstanding...
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Description
Humanism, in both its rhetoric and practice, attempted to transform the relationships between men that constituted the fabric of early modern society. So argues Alan Stewart in this ground-breaking investigation into the impact of humanism in sixteenth-century England. Here the author shows that by valorizing textual skills over martial prowess, humanism provided a new means of upward mobility for the lowborn but humanistically trained scholar: he...