Jonathan Dollimore

Jonathan G Dollimore
Born	1948 Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, England
Occupation	philosopher and cultural critic

Jonathan G Dollimore (born 1948 in Leighton Buzzard) is an English philosopher and social theorist in the fields of Renaissance literature (especially drama), gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), art, censorship, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory.

After leaving school at fifteen he took various jobs, before returning, as a mature student, to Keele University, where he achieved his BA, and the University of London, which awarded him his PhD

As a Reader at the University of Sussex, he co-founded with Alan Sinfield the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, which, as he remembers in Sex, Literature and Censorship, 'attracted some notoriety for being the first of its kind in the country' (3). He later became Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Dollimore is credited with making major interventions in debates on sexuality and desire, Renaissance literary culture, art and censorship, and cultural theory.

Radical Tragedy (1984, 2nd edition 1989, 3rd edition 2004)

In his first book, Dollimore argues that the humanist critical tradition has distorted for modern readers the actual radical function of Early Modern English drama, which had to do with 'a critique of ideology, the demystification of political and power relations and the decentring of "man"' (4).

Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited with Alan Sinfield (1985, 2nd edition 1994)

Treading the same path as Radical Tragedy, this compendium of essays by leading writers on Shakespeare has as its goal to replace our idea of a timeless, humane and civilising Shakespeare with a Shakespeare anchored in the social, political and ideological conflicts of his historical moment. Included are essays by Stephen Greenblatt and Kathleen McLuskie.

Sexual Dissidence (1991)

In Sexual Dissidence, Dollimore sets out “to retrieve lost histories of perversion”, in part by tracing the term “perverse” back to its etymological origins in Latin and its epistemological origins in Augustine. A second theoretical section places Freud and Foucault in dialogue on the subject of perversion, followed by a second historical section, this time, on homophobia.

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