{"product_id":"the-literature-of-lesbianism","title":"The Literature of Lesbianism","description":"\u003cp\u003eSince the Renaissance  countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. From Renaissance love poems to twentieth-century novels  plays  and short stories  The Literature of Lesbianism brings together hundreds of literary works on the subject of female homosexuality. This is not an anthology of \"lesbian writers.\" Nor is it simply a one-sided compendium of \"positive\" or \"negative\" images of lesbian experience. Terry Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the \"idea of lesbianism\": its conceptual origins and how it has been transmitted  transformed  and collectively embellished over the past five centuries.  Both male and female authors are represented here and they display an astonishing and often unpredictable range of attitudes. Some excoriate female same-sex love; some eulogize it. Some are salacious or satiric; others sympathetic and confessional. Yet what comes across everywhere is just how visibleas a literary themeSapphic love has always been in Western literature. As Castle demonstrates  it is hardly the taboo or forbidden topic we sometimes assume it to be  but has in fact been a central preoccupation for many of our greatest writers  past and present.  Beginning with an excerpt from Ariostos comic epic poem  Orlando Furioso  the anthology progresses chronologically through the next five centuries  presenting selections from Shakespeare  John Donne  Katherine Philips  Aphra Behn  Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz  Alexander Pope  the Marquis de Sade  Samuel Taylor Coleridge  Charlotte Bront  Emily Dickinson  Guy de Maupassant  Henry James  Willa Cather  Virginia Woolf  Ernest Hemingway  Nella Larsen  Colette  and Graham Greene  among many others. It also includes some anonymous worksseveral published here for the first timeas well as numerous translations from the writers of antiquity  such as Sappho  Ovid  Martial  and Juvenal  whose rediscovery in the early Renaissance helped shape subsequent Western literary representations of female homosexuality.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44963198795829,"sku":"ByrdShop_0231125100","price":175.17,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780231125109.jpg?v=1770408704","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-literature-of-lesbianism","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}