Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

ISBN-13: 9780415640039 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 314 str.

Jolene Zigarovich

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Foreword Regina Barreca Introduction Jolene Zigarovich Part I. Marriage and Grave Plots 1. The Wages of Sanctity: Fatal Consequences of Marriage and Motherhood in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel Ruth Bienstock Anolik 2. Corkscrews and Courtesans: Sex and Death in Circulation Novels Bonnie Blackwell 3. Courting Death: Necrophilia in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Jolene Zigarovich 4. Venus Dissected: The Visual Blazon of Mid-18th Century Medical Atlases Marcia Nichols Part II. Sexual and Mortal Fantasies 5. The Temptation of Alexander Pope: Materialism and Sexual Fantasy in ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ James Steintrager 6. Trading Sex for Secrets in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess Scott Black 7. Sex, Madness, and Suicide in Sir Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness Maximillian Novak 8. Erotic Death Machines: Sex and Execution in James Boswell’s Writing Katherine Ellison Part III. Gothic Difference 9. Between Life and Death: Representing Necrophilia, Medicine, and the Figure of the Intercessor in M.G. Lewis’s The Monk Laura Miller 10. 'Out of Tune:' Sex, Death, and Gothic Disharmony in Eighteenth-Century Scotland Hamish Mathison 11. Psychodrama: Hypertheatricality and Sexual Excess on the Gothic Stage George E. Haggerty 12. Sex, Sodomy and Death Sentences in the Long Eighteenth Century Ian McCormick Afterword Jolene Zigarovich

O autorze

Jolene Zigarovich is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Claremont Graduate University, US.