Amatory pleasures
Subtitle: explorations in eighteenth-century sexual culture
By: Julie Peakman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781474226431; 9781474226448
Subjects: Sex; Sex in literature; Sex customs; History
Description: "Encompassing the long 18th century, this reader examines a broad and enticing variety of topics in the history of sexuality in Georgian times. It includes discussion of sexual perversion, erotic gardens, gentlemen's secret societies, flagellation, pornography, writings of courtesans and the world of female friendship, revealing the secret or hidden meanings circulating between mainstream and covert activities of the 18th century. Including material previously available only in academic journals, revising these for a new readership and including two completely new chapters, Julie Peakman draws connections between these pieces and situates them within current debates. Her introduction examines how the covert life of Georgian sex was integrated from low life and high places, in brothels and palaces. Aimed at undergraduate and graduate students of gender, history of sexuality, sex literature and 18th-century history, Amatory Pleasures is an invaluable reader of the work of a key scholar in the field"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Continuities and change in sexual behaviour and attitudes from the eighteen century; title: 'Perversion of the course of nature': sexual variations in the eighteenth century; title: Blaming and shaming in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print culture; title: Whore biographies in the eighteenth century; title: Memoirs of women of pleasure: autobiographies; title: Initiation, defloration and flagellation: sexual propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; title: 'The best freind in the world' : the relationship between Emma Hamilton and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples; title: Bodily anxieties in Enlightenment sex literature; title: Medicine, the body and the botanical sexual metaphor in erotica; title: The eigtheenth- century erotic garden.