Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism

The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism

Brideoake, Fiona

Hardcover

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1611487617
ISBN13: 9781611487619
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Apr 6 2017
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.58
Height: 1.50 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of retirement turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes proof of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby's intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life--written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday--to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

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