Jonathan Dollimore

Abstract

Jonathan Dollimore (b. 1948) is a writer and academic whose work on early modern literature, desire, and sexuality has been of preeminent importance to English studies for the last forty years. He is best known as the author of Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries and Sexual Dissidence, as the co-editor of and key contributor to Political Shakespeare, and as the co-originator, with Alan Sinfield, of the critical practice known as cultural materialism. Taken together these interventions revolutionized literary studies by combining a dedication to close textual analysis with an examination of the social and political contexts within which texts are produced and received, a deployment of theory and philosophy and, most controversially, an explicit commitment to progressive political causes. Each of the latter three aspects of this methodology met with considerable objections because they challenged idealist notions of literature as timeless, apolitical, and offering privileged access to an unchanging human nature. Alongside New Historicism, Dollimore and Sinfield’s cultural materialism has been instrumental in introducing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of English literature, so much so that it is now routine for critics and students to consider historical documents, theory, and popular culture alongside canonical literary texts. It is, however, less common to see the political and philosophical elements of Dollimore’s method being pursued systematically, a tendency that he has lamented. Dollimore has always advocated that politics and theory should be backed up with action; to this end, in the same year as the publication of Sexual Dissidence (1991), he co-founded with Sinfield the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex, a hub for research and teaching on sexuality and queer studies. The first of its kind in the United Kingdom, the controversial center did significant work to establish the discipline of queer studies/queer theory in the United Kingdom. Dollimore’s work has always been concerned with locating marginal groups within hegemonic cultures, be they gays, lesbians or bisexuals, crossdressers, sex workers, or “perverts,” and with showing how dissident ideas and practices persist alongside dominant ideologies and can even be co-opted by them. He has repeatedly argued against “wishful” uses of theory, and advocates a sustained engagement with intellectual history as a vital corrective to this tendency, an approach that he has practiced throughout his career.