Crossing Borders

Editora:

University of Pennsylvania Press

Código:

491_9780812240870

Vendido e entregue por Um Livro

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Crossing BordersLove Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesSahar AmerWinner of the 2009 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for comparative literary studiesCrossing Borders is a bold and groundbreaking work. Situated at the nexus of queer theory and postcolonial medievalism, it interrogates and seeks to conjoin two significant areas of inquiry: the literary representation of lesbianism and the influence of Arabic traditions on medieval French narrative. Working across a range of genres in both languages, Sahar Amer unearths hitherto unrecognized allusions to lesbianism in Old French texts, arguing that these represent traces of Arabic influence on the key genres of romance and epic.--Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa CruzA must read for scholars working in Arabic and European medieval studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, gender and sexuality, comparative literature, and a variety of other disciplines.--Journal of Arabic LiteratureGiven Christianitys valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety.In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to

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