The Telling of the Act

The Telling of the Act PDF Author: Peter Maxwell Cryle
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137484
Category : Erotic stories, French
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
This book tells how the diverting array of pleasures in eighteenth-century libertine fiction gave way, through a process of thematic drift and realignment, to a powerfully linear story that actually defined sex and the gender roles pertaining to it. Many of the key notions in modern talk about sex are in fact narrative ones: climax, foreplay, and the sex act are all said to lie at the heart of human sexuality. But 'The Telling of the Act' questions whether these notions deserve to be thought of as timeless, and in fact locates their emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Telling of the Act

The Telling of the Act PDF Author: Peter Maxwell Cryle
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137484
Category : Erotic stories, French
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book

Book Description
This book tells how the diverting array of pleasures in eighteenth-century libertine fiction gave way, through a process of thematic drift and realignment, to a powerfully linear story that actually defined sex and the gender roles pertaining to it. Many of the key notions in modern talk about sex are in fact narrative ones: climax, foreplay, and the sex act are all said to lie at the heart of human sexuality. But 'The Telling of the Act' questions whether these notions deserve to be thought of as timeless, and in fact locates their emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Geometry in the Boudoir

Geometry in the Boudoir PDF Author: Peter Maxwell Cryle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description


Designing Women

Designing Women PDF Author: Tita Chico
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
"Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room embodies contradictory connotations, linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet.

Morbid Undercurrents

Morbid Undercurrents PDF Author: Sean M. Quinlan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501758357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
In Morbid Undercurrents, Sean M. Quinlan follows how medical ideas, stemming from the so-called birth of the clinic, zigzagged across the intellectual landscape of the French Revolution and its aftermath. It was a remarkable "hotspot" in the historical timeline, when doctors and scientists pioneered a staggering number of fields—from forensic investigation to evolutionary biology—and their innovations captivated the public imagination. During the 1790s and beyond, medicine left the somber halls of universities, hospitals, and learned societies and became profoundly politicized, inspiring a whole panoply of different—often bizarre and shocking—subcultures. Quinlan reconstructs the ethos of the time and its labyrinthine underworld, traversing the intersection between medicine and pornography in the works of the Marquis de Sade, efforts to create a "natural history of women," the proliferation of sex manuals and books on family hygiene, anatomical projects to sculpt antique bodies, the rage for physiognomic self-help books that taught readers to identify social and political "types" in post-revolutionary Paris, the use of physiological medicine as a literary genre, and the "mesmerist renaissance" with its charged debates over animal magnetism and somnambulism. In creating this reconstruction, Quinlan argues that the place and authority of medicine evolved, at least in part, out of an attempt to redress the acute sense of dislocation produced by the Revolution. Morbid Undercurrents exposes how medicine then became a subversive, radical, and ideologically charged force in French society.

Body Parts

Body Parts PDF Author: Clara Elizabeth Orban
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780934223973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Explores the link between Herve Guibert, one of France's most provocative contemporary writers who died of AIDS in 1991, and the Marquis de Sade, the most notorious Enlightenment libertine.

The Geometry of Modernism

The Geometry of Modernism PDF Author: Miranda B. Hickman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292709439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work. Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

Laughter and Power

Laughter and Power PDF Author: John Phillips
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Laughter and power are here examined in a variety of contexts, ranging from the satires of Renaissance Humanism through to the polemics of contemporary journalism. How do the powerful use laughter as a cultural weapon which reinforces their position? How do the powerless use laughter as a last resort in their self-defence? Sixteenth-century intellectuals applied their satires to a campaign against intolerance. Seventeenth-century absolutism demanded of comedy that it serve its interests. Yet subversive humour survived, even at the court, and led through the Enlightenment to its apogee in the black humour of Sade. Twentieth-century experimental fiction owes that trend a conscious debt. Meanwhile an aesthetic tradition, represented here by Flaubert, Beckett and Queneau, incites a laughter which releases tension rather than raising awareness. As humour theorists, Bergson, Freud and Koestler help focus these concerns.

Voluptuous Philosophy

Voluptuous Philosophy PDF Author: Natania Meeker
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823226964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself - in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies - as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure - how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers? - are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the "matter" of the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event - the reading of works of fiction - come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true - to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real? Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of "the literary" as an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects.

Libertine Enlightenment

Libertine Enlightenment PDF Author: L. O'Connell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230522815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Sex in the Eighteenth-century was not simply a pleasure; it had profound philosophical and political implications. This book explores those implications, and in particular the links between sexual freedom and liberty in a variety of European and British contexts. Discussing prostitutes and politicians, philosophers and charlatans, confidence tricksters and novelists, Libertine Enlightenment presents a fascinating overview of the sexual dimension of enlightened modernity.

Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader

Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader PDF Author: Paul J. Young
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351901362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
As he demonstrates that narratives of seduction function as a master plot for French literature in the eighteenth century, Paul Young argues that the prevalence of this trope was a reaction to a dominant cultural discourse that coded the novel and the new practice of solitary reading as dangerous, seductive practices. Situating his study in the context of paintings, educational manuals, and criticism that caution against the act of reading, Young considers both canonical and lesser-known works by authors that include Rousseau, Sade, Bastide, Laclos, Crébillon fils, and the writers of two widely read libertine novels. How these authors responded to a cultural climate that viewed literature, and especially the novel, as seductive, sheds light on the perils and pleasures of authorship, the ways in which texts interact with the larger cultural discourse, and what eighteenth-century texts tell us about the dangers of reading or writing. Ultimately, Young argues, the seduction not in the text, but by the text raises questions about the nature of pleasure in eighteenth-century French literature and culture.