Acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills the central tenets of the Gallic gospel of love from her reading of the great French literary works, as well as from the people she has known and her own memories of France, examining almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments that reveal how the particularly French concept of l'amour has endured and evolved.

How important to Byron was the love of men - a love he found celebrated in classical literature? And how did his contemporaries regard such relations? Making use of previously unpublished letters from the poet and his circle, Louis Crompton traces Byron's many homoerotic involvements, from his idealistic schoolboy enthusiasms to the unhappy love affair he was embroiled in at the end of his life. Professor Crompton argues that Byron's homosexuality...

Unlike much of the scholarship that has reexamined issues of gender and sexuality in the Restoration and eighteenth century, this book is not concerned with tracing the emergence of a proto-modern "homosexual" identity. In The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, the central question is: Why did so many eighteenth-century writers represent the sodomite at all? What purposes did these representations serve? Charting the emergence of the sodomite as a social...

This book is about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary-works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, among others-it is framed by political considerations, notably the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that denied any constitutional act to private consensual acts that the court termed 'homosexual sodomy' and the rhetoric attaching sodomy to Saddam Hussein in the initial U.S. war in Iraq.The book...