Framing the Christian defense of marital monogamy against Ephesians 5's suggestion that all believers are married in Christ, this book argues for the presence of competing marriage theologies in four ...Shakespeare plays: The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter's Tale.
Building on scholarship regarding both biblical and early modern sexualities, Members of His Body protests the Christian defense of marital monogamy. According to the Paul who authors 1 Corinthians, ...believers would do well to remain single and focus instead on the messiah's return. According to the Paul who authors Ephesians, plural marriage is the telos of Christian community. Turning to Shakespeare, Will Stockton shows how marriage functions in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter's Tale as a contested vehicle of Christian embodiment. Juxtaposing the marital theologies of the different Pauls and their later interpreters, Stockton reveals how these plays explore the racial, religious, and gender criteria for marital membership in the body of Christ. These plays further suggest that marital jealousy and paranoia about adultery result in part from a Christian theology of shared embodiment: the communion of believers in Christ.
In the wake of recent arguments that expanding marriage rights to gay people will open the door to the cultural acceptance and legalization of plural marriage, Members of His Body reminds us that much Christian theology already looks forward to this end.
Sex before Sex Bromley, James M; Stockton, Will
02/2013
eBook
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 Sexmakes 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 Sexoffers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, includingRomeo 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.
Contributors: Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Will Fisher, CUNY-Lehman College; Stephen Guy-Bray, U of British Columbia; Melissa J. Jones, Eastern Michigan U; Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College; Nicholas F. Radel, Furman U; Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt U; Christine Varnado, U of Buffalo-SUNY.
This essay builds on scholarship surrounding the foreclosure of same-sex love and friendship in Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen to argue that the play also struggles to realise ...marriage as a union of man and wife into 'one flesh'. At turns mocking and subscribing to the trope of Palamon and Arcite as one person, the play's marriage plot stumbles over the problem of how to create a monogamous heterosexual couple. By reading The Two Noble Kinsmen in relation to The Winter's Tale and its handling of similar questions surrounding the identity of friends and spouses, this essay argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher's play highlights the impossibility of counting two as one in a fallen world. The tragicomedy reaches its 'happy' marital ending at the expense of its repeated suggestions that husband and wife, unlike Adam and Eve, are one with others before they marry. The plot summarily compels the creation of the married couple even as the play repeatedly reminds its audience that the couple is a fiction predicated on the denial of one's oneness with others.
Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton—with humor and dry wit—reads psychoanalytic theory through early ...modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.
Little Prime Movers Will Stockton
The journal of Ayn Rand studies,
07/2013, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay accounts for the adolescent popularity ofThe FountainheadandAtlas Shruggedby arguing that both novels indirectly appropriate the mid-twentieth-century figure of the rebel. By denying their ...“prime movers” much of a childhood, however, both novels heroize rebels who never suffer the dilemma that defines the adolescent according to Erik H. Erikson: the struggle between identity and role confusion. Following Erikson and Julia Kristeva, this essay reads Rand's prime movers as figures of a post-Oedipal fantasy of self-reconciliation and career-oriented drive—figures who invite their reader into the fantasy of a life lived without adolescence's defining identity crisis.
Little Prime Movers Stockton, Will
The journal of Ayn Rand studies,
07/2013, Letnik:
13, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract This essay accounts for the adolescent popularity of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by arguing that both novels indirectly appropriate the mid-twentieth-century figure of the rebel. By ...denying their “prime movers” much of a childhood, however, both novels heroize rebels who never suffer the dilemma that defines the adolescent according to Erik H. Erikson: the struggle between identity and role confusion. Following Erikson and Julia Kristeva, this essay reads Rand's prime movers as figures of a post-Oedipal fantasy of self-reconciliation and career-oriented drive—figures who invite their reader into the fantasy of a life lived without adolescence's defining identity crisis.
This essay accounts for the adolescent popularity of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by arguing that both novels indirectly appropriate the mid-twentieth-century figure of the rebel. By denying ...their 'prime movers' much of a childhood, however, both novels heroize rebels who never suffer the dilemma that defines the adolescent according to Erik H. Erikson: the struggle between identity and role confusion. Following Erikson and Julia Kristeva, this essay reads Rand's prime movers as figures of a post-Oedipal fantasy of self-reconciliation and career-oriented drive-figures who invite their reader into the fantasy of a life lived without adolescence's defining identity crisis. Reprinted by permission of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Foundation
