 | Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production Subjects: Arts; Humanities; Language & Literature; Art & Visual Culture; History; Philosophy; Literature; Social & Cultural History; Philosophy of Sex & Love; Interdisciplinary Literary Studies; Literary/ Critical Theory; Literature by Period; Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields--Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies--that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume's embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work. Nicholas R. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies (Bucknell University) whose research agenda explores the agency, subjectivity, and performance of black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia and the Ibero-Atlantic world. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros : Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and a co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) with Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier. Jones also is a co-editor of the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and has published widely in peer-reviewed venues such as Hispanic Review , Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies , postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies , and University of Toronto Quarterly . Chad Leahy is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Denver, where his research and teaching focus on medieval and early modern Spanish cultural studies. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Jerusalem and the Early Modern Invention of Spain , and is also co-author (with Ken Tully) of Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-Century Crusade (Routledge, 2019). His research has appeared in journals including Anuario Lope de Vega, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Cervantes, Criticón, Hispanic Review, Lemir , Revista de Literatura Medieval, Romance Notes, and Translat Library . |
