...Adam Komisaruk Critics from the eighteenth century to the present have largely agreed in portraying Erasmus Darwin as an apostle of sexual liberation. One of Darwin’s career-long themes, that erotic love unifies the visible universe and the invisible, reaches its apotheosis in The Botanic Garden...

... with the formal erotic, affective, and spiritual experience of rapture and thus demonstrates their dynamic interconnectedness. The result is a new account of Pope's poetic career, and a new assessment of the relationships between writing and life. Pope came to concentrate on writing satire in the last third...

...Hal Gladfelder In the wake of the court cases that led to the clearing for publication of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure , a handful of publishers rushed other more or less erotic eighteenth-century novels into print, eager to cash in on the new celebrity of Fanny Hill (as it was usually known...

...William Walker Lubey Kathleen . Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760 . ( Lewisburg : Bucknell Univ. , 2012 ). Pp. xi + 271. 19 ills. $85 Copyright 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 Review Essay Aroused...

... désir de fonder le savoir humain sur des bases nouvelles” (1). If technical, moral, and philosophi- cal forms of advancement are possible — and indeed desirable — why not erotic evolution as well? In other recent studies of libertine thought, the eighteenth century has similarly been presented...

...Pamela Cheek Kushner Nina . Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris . ( Ithaca : Cornell Univ. , 2013 ). Pp. xi + 295 . $35 Copyright 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 Review Essay Demi...

... of the Man of Feeling. Romanticism, in turn, disciplines sensibility’s disruptive forms of enjoyment by replacing pleasure, which is polymorphic and erotic, with desire, “that which,” in Nagle’s words, “is not yet” (12, emphasis his). Romanticism is read as a heteronormative cultural formation...

... 9 10 Eighteenth-Century Life eighteenth-­century amorous pastimes are to believed, eroticism is hard work and serious business. Sex involves “engaging” with Enlightenment, or calcu- lating social values, or investigating print culture, or performing—perhaps the wrong word—any...

... with erotic interest in other women. Yet, what strikes me about these comedies is how easily they let such characters off the hook: “condemnation” is far too strong a word for these characters’ fates. The question is why they are not treated more harshly. The answer...

..., broadside ballads, pamphlets, domesti- cally produced bawdy books, and openly erotic books imported from Europe. Sexual relations were perceived as natural and enjoyable, and pleasures sought outside of marriage were deemed desirable and guilt free—for women as well as men. Generous quotations from...

... that theater and theatrical metaphors provided printmakers with an effective and concrete way of imaging a concept, idea, or point of view (17). She makes clear that the the- ater offered printmakers another arena of signs and sign making from which to draw. For example, she explains how the erotic...

..., there was a radical shift, for “the addi- tional Objects then of real, beautiful Women, could not but draw a pro- portion of new Admirers to the Theatre.”1 The success of the innovation depended upon the erotic impact of live female bodies, but also, less obvi- ously, upon the women’s genuine entrepreneurial...

... Wilson agrees with Marsden that sometimes these plays indulge in the display of female suffering for erotic entertainment, they are nevertheless more likely to encourage identification and sympathy with the heroine. In fact, it is the combination of heroic virtue with sentimental emotion expressed...

... Lucretius is not a Christian, but neither is he uncompromising about the mortality of the soul. In addition to softening Lucretius s mortalism, Dryden intends to enhance Lucretius s charm for his intended reader by casting the poem s erotic relationships in familiar English- Petrarchan terms of pleasing...

... on the ideal of friendship rather than erotic love. Clearly, even in its reformist manifestations, pro-­marriage discourse does not compel us to think beyond marriage per se. What Walker drives home is that anti-­marriage discourse does not do any better. However antiestablish- ment Godwin...

... translator of Lucian, Thomas Heywood, prefaced his ver- sion of the Ganymede story with the claim that “Jove’s Masculine love this Fable reprehends.”21 Cannon, by contrast, leaves the moralizing to Juno, obviously prompted by jealousy, not principle, and “bathes” in Jove’s erotic yearning: “It shall...

... 96      97 Certainly same-sex eroticism is central to the plot of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and both W. H. Ireland in The Abbess (1799) and Maturin in Mel- moth the Wanderer (1820) seem to take pleasure in fetishizing...

.... x + 307. $95 Kushner, Nina. Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2013). Pp. xi + 295. $35 Ledoux, Ellen Malenas. Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013...

... and what it is a trope for. A lengthier engagement with the dynamics of gratitude would also have been most welcome, and I wondered whether contemporary theoriza- tions of the gift might have added some layers or complications to Boulukos’s argument. What about the erotics of gratitude? Were...

... on the physical presence of the let- ter allows him to conjure the physical presence of its addressees in erotic and titillating ways. Within the Journal, the fact that his addressees clearly cannot be with him licenses fantasies of presence and proximity that may well have exceeded the actual state...