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Description of  Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy

Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stocktonwith humor and dry witreads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body. Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same truths, Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysisassociated with Jean Laplancheto develop a more playful analytic for literary studies. This analytic brings together different discourses of sexuality and the body and allows individual writings to reform psychoanalytic wisdom about sexuality, waste, and comedy. Through original explorations of works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington, Thomas Nashe, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Stockton further encourages the reconciliation of psychoanalysis and queer historicism. He focuses in large part on the less-often-read texts of the early modern English canon, assessing the ways in which these books have been purged from the canon in the name of generic purity. Read more