Research Expertise and Interest

gender, sexuality, English, 16th-18th-Century English, Italian and French literature, art and literature, 17th-Century political writing, landscape and the city, Enlightenment materialism, sexuality in Renaissance Italian art and Antiquity, ecocriticism in literature and art

Research Description

James Grantham Turner's recent books examine eroticism in Renaissance art and aesthetic theory, and the integration of Eros, architecture, poetry and landscape in the Villa Farnesina, Rome. Current research involves the afterlife and influence of the Farnesina and its impact on English writers visiting Rome, including John Milton, part of a larger work-in-progress entitled "Under Milton's Skin."   Previous publications explored Milton, Behn and Rochester, libertine literature in Europe, sexuality in the early novel, erotic education in the French Enlightenment, the gender politics of Adam and Eve, landscape, ecology and the representation of rural life.