Cultural Politics - Queer Reading » (REV)

Cultural Politics - Queer Reading is a bold and enduring challenge to the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature. It offers a widely influential investigation of the principles and practice that may inform dissident reading and a compelling argument for intellectual allegiances beyond the academy.
Since its initial publication in 1994, the lively, accessible polemic of Cultural Politics - Queer Reading has stimulated debates on the future of critical theory and the role of gender, ethnic and cultural studies within academic literary studies. Alan Sinfield engages - freely, provocatively and wittily - with topics such as the gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War and the history of cultural materialism, and discusses figures such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde, Thom Gunn and Jeanette Winterson. In an illuminating new introduction written especially for this edition, Sinfield revisits the book's agenda for a new form of cultural critique and a truly political lesbian and gay studies. He situates the volume in its original contexts, assesses the fate of queer theory and renews his call for an "Englit" that confidently incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

Booknews

Starting from mainstream texts (e.g., Jane Austen's Persuasion, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Merchant of Venice) and assumptions, the chapters in this volume move toward subcultural readings and the principles that inform them. Male gayness runs through the discussions as part of the author's argument that intellectuals should work in their own subcultural constituencies. Paper edition (unseen), $11.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)