Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance

This is the first wide-ranging theoretical study to investigate how sexuality underlies literary production in the French Renaissance. It examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and French Renaissance literature, and explores the issues of gender, the body, and repression through detailed readings of key literary texts, including Sceve, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard and Montaigne. Professor Kritzman's study focuses on three major areas: gender identity and sexual difference in French Renaissance texts; how the body is represented in the blasons, love poetry and prose of the period; and the way in which figural language depicts the libidinal, political and social tensions at work in texts.Kritzman, Lawrence D. is the author of 'Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance' with ISBN 9780521356244 and ISBN 0521356245.