Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

"Will Stockton has his finger on the pulse of early modern studies. Playing Dirty is timely and exploratory, drawing together a range of approaches which have often been set against each other with theoretical cogency and an unusually light touch." Christopher Pye, Williams College

"Playing Dirty offers a highly readable, smart, and engaging intervention into the role of the history of sexuality in Renaissance studies, psychoanalysis, and in the burgeoning field of waste studies. Comedy and scatology have long been facile bedfellows, but Stocktons analysis asserts a fresh view on the trash of history. Playing Dirty translates well across many literary, cultural, and theoretical registers as it presents a unique view of what it means to be queer." Erin Labbie, Bowling Green State University

Author Bio

Will Stockton is assistant professor of English at Clemson University. He is editor, with Vin Nardizzi and Stephen Guy-Bray, of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze.