Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001Ed Madden
About the Author:
Ed Madden is an associate profess of English and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He is a graduate of Harding University in Arkansas and the University of Texas at Austin. His first book of poetry, Signals, was selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Prize. He is co-editor of Geographies and Genders in Irish Studies and The Emergence of Man into the 21st Century, an anthology of writings on male experience. He has published articles in College Literature, Journal of Homosexuality, French Literature Series, and other journals, and his essays on gay and lesbian culture have appeared in numerous publications, as well as on the National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed and embodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual differences and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has come to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualities. This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian and modernist writers reimagined Ovid’s tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or performative power in figures of sexual difference—most often a feminized, often homosexual male body, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity. To reconstruct the sexual and cultural history of Tiresias, the author examines a wide range of technological, medical, and sexual discourses. The strangely hybrid body of Tiresias—ambiguously gendered and sequentially sexed—offers an index of the proliferating discourses of sexual identity, especially as voice or performance can be read as a symptom of sexual deviance. Tracing the intersections of sexological, popular, and literary discourses of sexual difference, this book explores not only the cultural history of a sexual myth, but also the cultural representations of homosexuality, illuminating the persistent sexological images of homosexuality as gender inversion. ISBN: 978-0-8386-3937-5 For a full description, search our online database. About FDU Press New Releases Features Publications by Topic Recent Book Reviews Book Reviews by Topic Submission Guidelines
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