... the insertion of newly written, explicit sexual scenes in keeping with late twentieth-century tastes. It then offers close readings of both works, to assess the impact of Cleland’s pioneering novel-memoirs on the later history of erotic literature in the eighteenth century. Cleland Memoirs of an Oxford...

... epistemological issues, the experience of reading, and the nature of mind. But this poetry also challenges what she sees as one of the major assumptions of the period’s eroticism, namely, that literature requiring readers to imagine sex effectively instructs them in morality and aesthetic taste...

...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...

... 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...

... feeling as an essential ethical resource, while imaginative writers defended literature based on its capacity to stimu- late the social passions. For much of the twentieth century, however, literary Eighteenth-Century Life Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2010...

... of female sexual desire in Latin literature, is represented in a variety of ways with images of erotic fire. Yet Sapho’s is no ordinary sexual desire, not even the “guilty Love” of “Lesbian dames” (ll. 17–18), but a fatal illness: “Love enters there, and I’m my own Disease,” translated by the poet...

..., there are no entries in the index for homosexuality, or sodomy, or buggery. Sodomy is men- tioned in the chapter on popular erotic or bawdy literature when Lyons dis- cusses criminal trial collections reprinted in the colonies, but otherwise, homo- sexual behavior seems to be nonexistent, as far as Lyons...

... 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...

... and the origins of the legal controversy over obscene literature and, at the same time, forward to the famous trials of The Well of Loneliness , Ulysses , and Lady Chatterley's Lover , what we now consider that last, embarrassing hiccup of Victorian moralism. Dragged into prominence by Walter Kendrick's...

... to ongoing debates about the representation of women on the Res- toration and eighteenth-century London stage. In spite of the similar focus in these books on gender in dramatic literature, however, the two authors find sharply different versions of femininity in the plays they examine. While Thompson...

..., 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...

... model of the family unit is disrupted in gothic literature that posits haunted castles and claustrophobic homes as the primary locus of terror. 2 As Joanne Watkiss contends, gothic fiction disturbs social stability by offering households that are unfamiliar, violent, and unhomely. 3 Indeed...

... a moderate stance in the critical literature on Dryden s Lucretius. If the Dryden scholarship of the 1960s erred in its emphasis on Dryden s Christianizing or baptism of Lucretius, the corrective scholarship of the 1980s went too far in denying Dryden s self- distancing from mortalism.10 Dryden s English...

... and the repercussions its authors suff ered. In what follows I want, fi rst, to provide an account of Ancient and Modern Pederasty’s publication and sub- sequent trials and, second, to off er an overview of what I take to be its sig- nifi cance for readers interested in both eighteenth-century literature...

... + 233. $85 Erlin, Matt. Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2014). Pp. xii + 264. 11 ills. $79.95 hardcover. $29.95 paper Eron, Sarah. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment (Newark: Univ. of Delaware...

... Fits of Passion (1996) stand as exemplars of the critical literature—one might well ask whether it is possible to put new tires on this cultural vehicle and take it for a spin. Goring manages to do so by analyzing elocution debates that were carried out on the stage, in the pulpit...

... of fathers in the works of such artists as Elisabeth Louise Vigée-­Lebrun, Jean-­Baptiste Greuze, and Margue- rite Gérard. As part of the female alternative to the male model, Walker sug- gests that “women writers and artists take over the illicit language and images of libertine literature and rococo...

... mainstay. Kavanagh’s analyses of art and literature in the period are often fascinating. The discussion of the power of plea­sure as plot in Jacques Rochette de La Morlière’s Angola, histoire indienne (1746) and in the anonymous Thérèse philosophe (1748) refines our understanding of the libertine...

... in English literature. The French philosopher Etienne Gilson has remarked that “En vérité, la littérature anglaise à mieux honoré que la nôtre la mémoire d’Héloïse et d’Abélard,” yet this literature has remained largely obscure— with the exception of Pope’s important poem and its imitators— particu...