Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Sex before Sex

By: James M. Bromley, Will Stockton
Narrated by: Jim Pelletier
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places? Sex before Sex makes clear that we cannot simply transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays. The contributors confront how our current critical assumptions about definitions of sex restrict our understanding of representations of sexuality in early modern England.

Drawing attention to overlooked forms of sexual activity in early modern culture, from anilingus and interspecies sex to "chin-chucking" and convivial drinking, Sex before Sex offers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, including Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Paradise Lost, the figure of Lucretia, and pornographic poetry, this collection queries what might constitute sex in the absence of a widely accepted definition and how a historicized concept of sex affects the kinds of arguments that can be made about early modern sexualities.

©2013 Regents of the University of Minnesota (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Literary Theory cover art
Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) cover art
Autobiography cover art
The Big Lebowski and Philosophy cover art
Under the Sign of Saturn cover art
History cover art
Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale cover art
What's Wrong With Homosexuality? cover art
Virgin cover art
The Philosophy of Film Noir cover art
Styles of Radical Will cover art
Why Poetry Matters cover art
A Macat Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex cover art
Simply Dirac cover art
The Art of Cruelty cover art
Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical cover art

Critic reviews

"An absorbing read for anyone interested in the perceptions of sex and the sexual in Early Modern England and through the human continuum." ( Huffington Post UK)
" Sex before Sex engages questions about method and the future of queer studies. The determination of the authors to 'embrace the possibilities of the critics simultaneous anteriority and posteriority' to early modern sex makes this essential reading for early modernists, and I anticipate that it will inspire a good deal of scholarly work to come." ( Renaissance Quarterly)

What listeners say about Sex before Sex

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 1 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 2 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 1 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Too many long words

Too many long words whose meaning I would have to look up to understand to make this a feasible listen. Gave up after an hour

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!