Susan S Lanser

Under the bold banner of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, editors Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser gather a diverse spectrum of queer and feminist challenges to the theory and interpretation of narrative. The first edited collection to bring feminist, queer, and narrative theories into direct conversation with one another, this anthology places gender and sexuality at the center of contemporary theorizing about the production, reception, forms, and functions of narrative texts. Through twenty-one essays prefaced by a cogent history of the field, Narrative Theory Unbound offers new perspectives on narrative discourse and its constituent elements; on intersectional approaches that recognize race, religion, and national culture as integral to understanding sexuality and gender; on queer temporalities; on cognitive research; and on lifewriting in graphic, print, and digital constellations. Exploring genres ranging from reality TV to fairy tales to classical fiction, contributors explore the thorny, contested relationships between feminist and queer theory, on the one hand, and between feminist/queer theory and contemporary narratologies, on the other. Rather than aiming for cohesiveness or conclusiveness, the collection stages open-ended debates designed to unbind the assumptions that have kept gender and sexuality on the periphery of narrative theory.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pundits were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser demonstrates how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, and order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading, whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in "closeted" texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth - and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pundits were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser demonstrates how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, and order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading, whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in "closeted" texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.