This course is an advanced examination of 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 crossdressing 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?  This course will ask us to suspend modern conceptual divisions (between heterosexuality and homosexuality, normativity and perversity, for instance) in order to explore, in the broadest possible terms, how poets, dramatists, and medical writers represented erotic desire.  What kinds of literary conventions, formal structures, and modes of address did they employ?  What patterns of intertextuality, including that of Greek and Roman sources, can we identify?  How did dominant medical understandings of the body affect erotic images and narratives?  What kind of tropes and understandings did the emergence of the “new science” and colonialist exploration offer to erotic writing?  What kinds of pornography were available in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what do they have to do with literature?  How common were expressions of homoerotic desire, and how do we know them when we see them?  How are friendship, religious devotion, chastity and race implicated in discourses of eroticism?  How useful are modern analytical tools such as narcissism, fetishism, and voyeurism to expressions of desire and depictions of erotic practices?  Is the gender of the authorial signature pertinent?  We will explore these and many other questions and topics, including the homoerotics of pastoral, the colonialist politics of carpe diem, and why Adonis chooses hunting a boar over having sex with Venus.