Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

2013-05-02 Literary Criticism

Author : Jolene Zigarovich
Release : 2013-05-02
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 365/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature by : Jolene Zigarovich

Download or read book Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature written by Jolene Zigarovich. This book was released on 2013-05-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

2017-03-02 Literary Criticism

Author : Allan Ingram
Release : 2017-03-02
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 175/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture by : Allan Ingram

Download or read book Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture written by Allan Ingram. This book was released on 2017-03-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2023-02-28 Literary Criticism

Author : Jolene Zigarovich
Release : 2023-02-28
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 783/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by : Jolene Zigarovich

Download or read book Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel written by Jolene Zigarovich. This book was released on 2023-02-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature

2016-07-01 Literary Criticism

Author : Aleksondra Hultquist
Release : 2016-07-01
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 937/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature by : Aleksondra Hultquist

Download or read book New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature written by Aleksondra Hultquist. This book was released on 2016-07-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first critical collection on Delarivier Manley revisits the most heated discussions, adds new perspectives in light of growing awareness of Manley’s multifaceted contributions to eighteenth-century literature, and demonstrates the wide range of thinking about her literary production and significance. While contributors reconsider some well-known texts through her generic intertextuality or unresolved political moments, the volume focuses more on those works that have had less attention: dramas, correspondence, journalistic endeavors, and late prose fiction. The methodological approaches incorporate traditional investigations of Manley, such as historical research, gender theory, and comparative close readings, as well as some recently influential theories, like geocriticism and affect studies. This book forges new paths in the many underdeveloped directions in Manley scholarship, including her work’s exploration of foreign locales, the power dynamics between individuals and in relation to states, sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and the shifting operations and influences of genre. While it draws on previous writing about Manley’s engagement with Whig/Tory politics, gender, and queerness, it also argues for Manley’s contributions as a writer with wide-ranging knowledge of both the inner sanctums of London and the outer developing British Empire, an astute reader of politics, a sophisticated explorer of emotional and gender dynamics, and a flexible and clever stylist. In contrast to the many ways Manley has been too easily dismissed, this collection carefully considers many points of view, and opens the way for new analyses of Manley’s life, work, and vital contributions to the full range of forms in which she wrote.

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

2017-02-23 Literary Criticism

Author : Allan Ingram
Release : 2017-02-23
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 186/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture by : Allan Ingram

Download or read book Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture written by Allan Ingram. This book was released on 2017-02-23. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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