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The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature

Autor Christine Varnado
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 4 mai 2020
Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality

What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance.
Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed.
This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781517907761
ISBN-10: 1517907764
Pagini: 328
Ilustrații: 7
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 38 mm
Greutate: 0.52 kg
Editura: University of Minnesota Press
Colecția Univ Of Minnesota Press

Notă biografică

Christine Varnado is assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. 

Cuprins

Contents
Introduction: Reading for Desire
1. Getting Used, and Liking It: Erotic Instrumentality and the Go-Between
2. Everything That Moves: Promiscuous Fancy and Carnival Longing
3. It Takes One to Know One: Paranoid Suspicion and the Witch Hunt
4. Lost Worlds, Lost Selves: Queer Colonial Melancholia
Conclusion: The Persistence of Fancy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Recenzii

"An incredibly useful touchstone for queer studies."—Modern Philology 
"This powerful book brings important and fresh insight to the literature." —CHOICE