This course will introduce students to the wide variety of representations of eroticism in English literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It is commonly thought that our modern age must be far more liberated and explicit about sexuality than previous eras.  But in the last decades of the sixteenth century, circulating in manuscript versions were the first native English pornographic poem (about a dildo), an anonymous lyric advocating female-female marriage, and sonnets celebrating the beauty of a male beloved by the man who would soon be considered the greatest English poet.  Renaissance revenge tragedies often depicted brother-sister incest, while cross-dressing plays exploited the range of desires enabled by confusions of gender.  By the end of the seventeenth century, poems had been published expressing voyeuristic delight in watching one’s lover undress, describing the aesthetic allure of a woman’s nipples, and making fun of male impotence.

What accounts for this extraordinary range of literary interest in forms of eroticism?  In this class, we will suspend modern divisions between heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories of identity and ask more broadly, how did poets and dramatists represent erotic desire?  What kinds of literary conventions, formal structures, and modes of address did they employ?  How did the patriarchal nature of early modern society—and the institutions of the patriarchal household and marriage—affect erotic images and narratives?  How common are expressions of homoerotic desire, and how do we know them when we see them?  How is friendship implicated in discourses of eroticism?  How are specific erotic practices represented, and does it matter whether the author is male or female?  We will explore these and many other questions and topics, including the homoerotics of pastoral, the gender politics of carpe diem, and why Adonis chooses hunting a boar over having sex with Venus.