Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136182365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136182365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512823783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses--such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons--the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself--its parts, or its preserved representation--functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture PDF Author: Allan Ingram
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137597186
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

The Eighteenth Century

The Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Sambrook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317893247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished. It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.

Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century

Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Karen Harvey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521822350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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The Secret Life of Things

The Secret Life of Things PDF Author: Mark Blackwell
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise The Secret Life of Things thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology.

The Adversary Literature The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Genre

The Adversary Literature The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Genre PDF Author: Frederick R. Karl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description


The Origins of Sex

The Origins of Sex PDF Author: Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019993939X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
A man admits that, when drunk, he tried to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl; she is arrested and denies they had intercourse, but finally begs God's forgiveness. Then she is publicly hanged alongside her attacker. These events took place in 1644, in Boston, where today they would be viewed with horror. How--and when--did such a complete transformation of our culture's attitudes toward sex occur? In The Origins of Sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala provides a landmark history, one that will revolutionize our understanding of the origins of sexuality in modern Western culture. For millennia, sex had been strictly regulated by the Church, the state, and society, who vigorously and brutally attempted to punish any sex outside of marriage. But by 1800, everything had changed. Drawing on vast research--from canon law to court cases, from novels to pornography, not to mention the diaries and letters of people great and ordinary--Dabhoiwala shows how this dramatic change came about, tracing the interplay of intellectual trends, religious and cultural shifts, and politics and demographics. The Enlightenment led to the presumption that sex was a private matter; that morality could not be imposed; that men, not women, were the more lustful gender. Moreover, the rise of cities eroded community-based moral policing, and religious divisions undermined both church authority and fear of divine punishment. Sex became a central topic in poetry, drama, and fiction; diarists such as Samuel Pepys obsessed over it. In the 1700s, it became possible for a Church of Scotland leader to commend complete sexual liberty for both men and women. Arguing that the sexual revolution that really counted occurred long before the cultural movement of the 1960s, Dabhoiwala offers readers an engaging and wholly original look at the Western world's relationship to sex. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, The Origins of Sex is a major work of history.

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature

Sex and Death in Victorian Literature PDF Author: Regina Barreca
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Spine title: Sex & death in Victorian literature.

Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire PDF Author: J. Batchelor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.