Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny

The voluminous contemporary critical work on English Renaissance androgyny and transvestism debates has not fully uncovered the ancient Greek and Roman roots of the gender controversy. Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters argues that the variant Renaissance views on the androgyne’s symbolism are, in fact, best understood with reference to classical representations of the double-sexed or gender-baffled figure, and with the classical merging of that figure with images of beasts and monsters. Grace Tiffany’s discussion of ancient beast-androgynes draws on satire as well as myth, citing Archilochus alongside Homer, Aristophanes with Euripides, and Juvenal next to Ovid and Apuleius. She thus illuminates a gender dispute as old as Western culture itself.

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