The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times "always engaging...consistently fascinating," has helped to revolutionize eighteenth-century studies. The Female Thermometer brings together Castle's essays on the phantasmagoric side of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer," an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination--the ways in which...

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. From Renaissance love poems to twentieth-century novels, plays, and short stories, The Literature of Lesbianism brings together hundreds of literary works on the subject of female homosexuality. This is not an anthology of "lesbian writers." Nor is it simply a one-sided compendium of "positive" or "negative" images of lesbian experience. Terry Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism" its conceptual origins and how it has been transmitted, transformed,...

Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. From Renaissance love poems to twentieth-century novels, plays, and short stories, The Literature of Lesbianism brings together hundreds of literary works on the subject of female homosexuality. This is not an anthology of "lesbian writers." Nor is it simply a one-sided compendium of "positive" or "negative" images of lesbian experience. Terry Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism" its conceptual origins and how it has been transmitted, transformed,...

In this text about women as critics, Terry Castle investigates strong women writers with formidable personalities - Jane Austen, Collette, Willa Cather - often turning analysis of these figures and their work into a perspective on their lives and on life in general. Her canvas includes male writers too, such as the amorous Casanova. Many of these essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, where Castle is a regular contributor.

This text is about women as critics. Terry Castle investigates strong women writers with formidable personalities - Jane Austen, Collette, Willa Cather - often turning analysis of these figures and their work into a keen new perspective on their lives and on life in general. Her canvas includes male writers too, such as the amorous Casanova. Many of these essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, where Castle is a regular contributor.

Public masquerades were a popular and controversial form of urban entertainment in England for most of the eighteenth century. They were held regularly in London and attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from all ranks of society who delighted in disguising themselves in fanciful costumes and masks and moving through crowds of strangers. The authors shows how the masquerade played a subversive role in the eighteenth-century imagination, and that it was persistently associated with the crossing of class and sexual boundaries, sexual freedom, the overthrow of decorum, and urban...

Drawing on feminist criticism and hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authority in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.