ENG 300 14 - What’s Love Got to Do with It? Sexuality in Premodern English Literature

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Explores the construction of sexuality and desire in pre-modern English literature (500-1650). We’ll look at pre-modern constructions of the sexed body (including ideas about “natural” sex/gender, the third sex, the unisex and the multisex body), and the paradigms of desire that existed before our modern sexual identities. With the aid of contemporary critics, we’ll explore pre-modern hetero-normativity, sexual taboos, queer desires, and the pleasures of unruly bodies/desires. As we discuss the literature, we’ll consider various forms of erotic discourse, (including those in seemingly unlikely venues such as the writings of religious mystics), cross-dressing in Renaissance drama, the desiring subject and the sexual object of desire in medieval lyric poetry, same-sex desire, and the queering of desire in prose fiction before the novel.