Coriolanus (Vol. 30) | Lisa Lowe (essay date 1986)
Lisa Lowe (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: '"Say I Play the Man I Am': Gender and Politics in Coriolanus," in The Kenyon Review, n.s. Vol. VIII, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 86-95.
[In the following essay, Lowe sees in the world of Coriolanus a complex interaction between gender and politics, against which Coriolanus rebels in his refusal to be named.]
The concerns of this essay reflect the particular historical juncture at which we find ourselves as readers. Largely due to the feminist theory and literary criticism of the last decade, we now recognize that dramatic representations of sexuality and gender necessarily foreground political questions and issues, and likewise that what we may constitute as the political dimensions of a play—who wields power in the dramatic situation, how this authority is constructed, upon what it is founded, and by what means it is deployed—cannot be separated from the portraits of sexuality and the...
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