Why is shame so central to our identity and to our culture? What is its role in stigmatizing subcultures such as the Irish, the queer or the underclass? Can shame be understood as a productive force? In this lucid and passionately argued book, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces a from eighteenth-century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across...

This interdisciplinary volume of thirty original essays engages with four key concerns of queer theoretical work a identity, discourse, normativity and relationality. A combination of distinguished and emerging scholars from a wide range of international locations, put the terms a queera and a theorya under interrogation in and effort to map the relations and disjunctions between them. These contributors are especially attendant to the many theoretical discourses intersecting with queer theory a feminist theory, LGBT studies, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, disability studies, Marxism,...