Contrary to modern assumptions, sexual violence and rape were treated as severe crimes in the Middle Ages. This book examines the testimony in medieval and early modern German literature and traces the discourse on both aspects from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. M…
"This book takes Shakespeare's plays as a site for studying the specter of interracial sex - of a "jungle fever"--In early modern England's envisionings of itself. Shakespeare's works here assume the status of interrogating, of re-envisioning, rather than simply restaging the sc…
Examining the rhetoric of rape in British and Anglo-Indian fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paxton shows how it reflects basic concepts in the social and sexual contracts defining the women's relationship to the nation state.