HomeAuthor: C. Todd White

Author: C. Todd White

C. Todd White

Current Issue:
Age of Enlightenment
Special 25th Anniversary Book
Features From Current Issue

Essays

Cyrano’s Sodomitical Circle

THIS YEAR marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, but not the one you have in mind. Edmond Rostand’s hit play of 1897 invented an ultra-Romantic Cyrano, a magniloquent swashbuckler with a promontory of a nose. Hopelessly in love with his cousin Roxane, he sacrifices himself so she may wed the man she loves, ghost-writing his rival’s amorous declarations. This Cyrano—master duelist, improvisatory poet, independent spirit—has entered the popular imagination and spawned scores of imitations.

Features

‘The sapphic is far from a site of silence.’

The G&LR talks with the author of The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser, professor emerita of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, and a specialist in 18th-century European literature, with a focus on women writers and issues related to gender and sexuality.

Essays

‘Warm Brothers’ in 18th-century Berlin

Briefe über den Galantieren von Berlin, a travelogue by an anonymous Austrian officer published in Vienna in 1782, might make it into such an anthology, albeit in a different section. For this eyewitness account of sexual mores observed during a sojourn of fifteen months in Berlin is far from lyrical in its praise.

Essays

Rev. Bentley’s Man of Curious Habits

Rev. William Bentley’s diaries constitute a record of life in Salem between 1784 and 1814. The fact that Gibaut came to his attention, first as protégé and later as a close friend and companion—plus his artfully revealing references to Gibaut’s unusual “habits”—is thus of some note.
Blog
1. July 23, 2019 Adam
2. July 22, 2019 Making Montgomery Clift
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