The Sexual Politics of Victorian Historiographical Writing About the “RENAISSANCE”

Fisher, Will

doi:10.1215/10642684-2007-022

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…As I have already suggested and as Fisher (2008) elaborates, the "newly emergent notion of the homosexual" that we find in Ellis's work was closely related to conceptions of the Renaissance emerging in England during his lifetime (p. 42). From its inception in Ruskin's The Stones of Venice (1851) and John Addington Symonds' The Renaissance in Italy (1874), the Renaissance was imagined as queer territory (Fisher, 2008).…”

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confidence: 55%

“…94-95). If the overlap between modern sexual and literary discourses finds an early and precise articulation in Ellis, it neither originates with nor concludes in his work: As Fisher (2008) makes clear, the discursive overlap between the idealist notion of the Renaissance and homosexuality has a complex history in late-nineteenth-century England (p. 41). 3 That Ellis's literary and sexological writings respond to this history in ways that would become partly hegemonic in twentieth century criticism, especially in the post-World War II period, suggests only that Ellis's writings serve as models for understanding the connection between literature and sexuality in later criticism, where the intersection is more completely absorbed into a totalizing discourse that masks its deliberate ideological function.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…From its inception in Ruskin's The Stones of Venice (1851) and John Addington Symonds' The Renaissance in Italy (1874), the Renaissance was imagined as queer territory (Fisher, 2008). It is a point corroborated by Ellis himself when he writes in Sexual Inversion that "[t]he intellectual independence of those days and the influence of antiquity seem to have liberated and fully developed the impulses of those abnormal individuals who would otherwise have found no clear expression, and passed unnoticed" (Ellis & Symonds, 2008, pp.…”

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Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Radel

2009

Journal of Homosexuality

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Famous as the author of an early full-length scientific study of sexual inversion or homosexuality, English sexologist Havelock Ellis was also a literary critic responsible for initiating publication of the famous Mermaid Series of "The Best of Plays of the Old Dramatists" in the late-nineteenth century. Personally editing the first volume of plays by Christopher Marlowe and a later collection by tragedian John Ford, Ellis associated these playwrights here and in his scientific work, Sexual Inversion, with ideas about normative and so-called abnormal sexualities at the start of the twentieth century. Ellis, thus, helped give expression to a literary canon of early English dramatists in which modern, anachronistic ideas about sexual subjectivity play a part. While this article does not claim that Ellis was the necessary source for later criticism, it shows how, over the whole of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's priority in the literary canon came to be posited at least in part on his apparent sexual normality in contrast with a supposedly homosexual Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights such as Ford or Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher associated with varying degrees of sexual difference.

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Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Radel

2009

Journal of Homosexuality

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Hartley¹

2017

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama

López

2013

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For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.

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The Sexual Politics of Victorian Historiographical Writing About the “RENAISSANCE”

Cited by 6 publications

References 21 publications

Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

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Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama

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