Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History

The essays in this groundbreaking collection stage conversations between the thought of the controversial feminist philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and premodern writers. The authors address writers ranging from Empedocles and Homer, to Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne. They explore both the pre-Enlightenment roots of Luce Irigaray's thought, and their impact that her writings have had on our understanding of ancient, medieval and Renaissance culture. Luce Irigaray has been a major figure in Anglo-American literary theory, philosophy and gender studies ever since her germinal works,Speculum of the Other Woman,andThis Sex Which Is Not One,were published in English translation in 1985. This collection is the first sustained examination, both of Irigaray's crucial relationship to premodern discourses underpinning Western culture, and of the transformative effect she has had on scholars working in pre-Enlightenment periods. Like Irigaray herself, the essays work at theintersections of gender, theory, historicism and language. This collection offers powerful ways of understanding premodern texts through Irigaray's theories that allow us to imagine our past and present relationship to economics, science, psychoanalysis, gender, ethics and social communities in new ways.