Seeds of Things

Jonathan Goldberg was Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Emory University. His many books include Come As You Are, After Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists; Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility; and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. His writing centered on early modernity but ranged from Sappho and Willa Cather to Patricia Highsmith and Todd Haynes in exploring questions of materiality and sexuality.

"An impressive harvesting of a range of modern theories of materialism and ethical selfhood and an immensely fertile use of them for the original interpretation of culturally important texts." -- -Judith H. Anderson Indiana University "Goldberg's new book will be required reading for anyone writing about 'the material.' By thinking about materialism through Lucretius and his impact on early modern writers from Spenser to Hutchinson, Cavendish and Milton, in relation to Renaissance painting and to the Pauline tradition, Goldberg rethinks source study by working through important theoretical and philosophical problems while engaged in close reading. The Seeds of Things offers a cogent, learned and powerful non-essentialist theoretical argument about sexuality that eschews dominant paradigms that remain heavily invested in anachronistic notions of identity and it intervenes importantly in recent debates about the so-called 'post-human.' " -- -Karen Newman Brown University "Illuminates Cavendish's vitalism and the hinds of homoeroticism in Spenser (the Garden of Adonis) and in Milton (among the angels and between Adam and Raphael." -Renaissance Quarterly " ... philosophically, aesthetically, and conceptually challenging ..." -Studies in English Literature "The Seeds of Things excavates an excitingly radical strain of Lucretian materialism that wends its way through Renaissance painting and literature all the way to the work of Deleuze and Foucault. From the logic of atomic sameness and difference, the aleatory and the linear, Jonathan Goldberg derives a vision of complexly gendered bodies, their pleasures, and their ethics. In so doing he recasts works we thought we already knew. As unexpected as it is brilliant, this book is itself a surprising, Lucretian swerve in Goldberg's rich and distinguished career." -- -Richard Halpern Johns Hopkins University "This dazzling display of erudition advances studies of materialism... Highly recommended." -Choice "The Seeds of Things is an absorbing, beautiful, and vibratory book, which celebrates and enacts the vitality of the matter that we are. Goldberg picks up where Althusser left off, exposing a powerful underground current of an aleatory materialism in Euro-American culture, a 'secret other history of philosophy that belies its resolute idealism.' A multi-disciplinary tour de force." -- -Jane Bennett Johns Hopkins University