POST-CLOSET MASCULINITIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original red paper boards with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with a small brown stain to the tail of the spine. The contents are clean throughout, and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the very lightly rubbed dustwrapper, which is a touch faded to the spine, and otherwise without loss, or tears.

'[The book] argues for a theory of male subjectivity that subordinates questions of desire beneath the historical imperatives that inform those desires. Employing a post-closet identity theory, this book argues that writers like John Donne, William Shakespeare, and George Herbert created an ideology of masculinity in conjunction with and in response to the great epistemological upheavals in early modern England. [They] helped to create a masculinity that embodies an ironic subject position that is constantly shifting between men's desires for women and men's simultaneous rejection of women's bodies, and the inevitable encounter with the figure of the sodomite that their rejection invites' (publisher's blurb).