Desire: A Memoir, Paperback

In this meditative and haunting memoir, renowned cultural critic Jonathan Dollimore recounts a life spent dedicated to understanding the delight and disorder of human desire. Through recollections of his struggles with depression, his discovery of love and literature and his adventures cruising in the gay subcultures of late twentieth-century New York, Brighton and Sydney, Dollimore weaves a candid, nuanced narrative of life in a newly liberated and hedonistic world, soon to be devastated by AIDS. Effortless blending the tragic and comic, Dollimore's unique voice relates a life haunted and torn by loss, and the at once intensely personal yet universal experience of suffering and longing.

About author(s):Jonathan Dollimore is a literary theorist, specializing in the fields of Renaissance literature (especially drama), art, censorship and the history of ideas, and a trailblazer in the study of gender and queer theory. At the University of Sussex he pioneered cultural materialism in early modern and literary studies and gay studies in education, including co-founding there the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. His landmark books include Radical Tragedy (1984), with Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare (1985) and Sexual Dissidence (1991). In later books like Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1999) and Sex Literature and Censorship (2001) he turned his attention to a fresh interrogation of those dark, recalcitrant elements of desire and mortality that resist utopian transformation. He has held chairs at the University of Sussex and University of York and lectured and taught throughout the world.