Shakespeare Authority Sexuality

<p><em>Shakespeare Authority Sexuality</em> is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality history and culture by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as a body of ongoing argument and as it informs particular works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries especially in relation to sexuality in early-modern England and queer theory. </p><p>The book has several interlocking preoccupations:</p><ul> <li>theories of textuality and reading </li> <li>the political location of Shakespearean plays and the organisation of literary culture today </li> <li>the operation of state power in the early-modern period and the scope for dissidence </li> <li>the sex/gender system in that period and the application of queer theory in history. </li> </ul><p>These preoccupations are explored in and around a range of works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Throughout the book Sinfield re-presents cultural materialism framing it not as a set of propositions as has often been done but as a cluster of unresolved problems. His brilliant lucid and committed readings demonstrate that the ‘unfinished business’ of cultural materialism - and Sinfield’s work in particular - will long continue to produce new questions and challenges for the fields of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies. </p>