This reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, has been written by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. It will produce new challenges for the field of Renaissance Studies.

1. Unfinished Business: Problems in Cultural Materialism 2. Pastoral, As You Like It, and the Ideology of Literary History 3. Poetaster, The Author, and the Perils of Cultural Production 4. How to Read The Merchant Of Venice Without Being Heterosexist 5. Cultural Materialism And Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen 6. Effeminacy, Friendship and the Hero in Marlowe and Shakespeare 7. Near Misses: Ganymedes and Pageboys 8. Sex and the Lyric: Sidney, Barnfield, Marlowe 9. What Happens in Shakespeare's Sonnets 10. Rape and Rights: Measure For Measure and the Limits of Cultural Imperialism 11. Unfinished Business: Reprise Bibliography Index