Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
Summary
The French eighteenth century holds particular interest for a study of systems of sexual reference. It is not fortuitous that libertinage was a key term for the culture, used to denote both sexual and intellectual license, and it seems in retrospect almost inevitable that as the century moved into its final eruptive phase an author such as Sade should have insisted upon the necessary alliance between the two. Heir to the tyrannical bienséances of the recently triumphant polite society (le monde), yet philosophically dedicated to epicureanism, governed by an authoritarian complex of political institutions yet driven by a “modern” ethos of freedom and individualism, the culture exhibits nearly everywhere the same isomorphism: a visible, official orthodoxy overlaying, but not quite hiding from view, the scandal of a heterodoxy attempting always to emerge. Whatever stability the culture possessed, in fact, was assured neither by the power of the orthodoxy nor by the strength of its cultural antagonist, but rather by the evolving symbiotic relationship between the two. The tension between these opposing forces gives the age its peculiar historical identity. Significantly Rousseau, the cultural outsider who denounced the tension itself and refused to be part of it, found himself denounced in turn and cast out by the representatives of both sides, officialdom and philosophies. Sade, proposing a different but equally radical dissolution of the tension through the definitive triumph of libertinage, was to meet with the same fate.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Tis Nature's FaultUnauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, pp. 217 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988