Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan

by Richard Halpern

Starting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual--and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art. Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812236610
• ISBN13: 9780812236613
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.8" x 8.6"