Libertine Enlightenment: Sex Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403917639 ISBN 13: 9781403917638

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Synopsis

This volume draws attention to some eighteenth-century figures who, by their mobility, their disrespect for authority, and in some cases their dishonesty, might once have been thought unworthy of scholarly attention. This book opposes the great thinkers of a supposedly monolithic Enlightenment to a peripheral world of radicals and miscreants and seeks to understand the coexistence, and to some degree the complicity, of a wide range of eighteenth-century "libertines" in the Enlightenment project. Through the study of a range of individuals --including female rakes and libertine whores (Con Phillips, Jeanne La Motte, Casanova's Henriette), the great thinkers (Voltaire, Kant, Goethe), and some of the most notorious adventurers and rebels (Wilkes, Casanova, Cagliostro, Sade)--this book reflects on the history of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the Europe that hosted it.

About this title

Synopsis:

Sex in the Eighteenth century was not simply a pleasure it had profound philosophical and political implications. This book explores those implications, and in particular the links between sexual freedom and liberty in a variety of European and British contexts. Discussing prostitutes and politicians, philosophers and charlatans, confidence tricksters and novelists, Libertine Enlightenment presents a fascinating overview of the sexual dimension of enlightened modernity.

ALAN CORKHILL Senior Lecturer in German Studies, University of Queensland, Australia SIMON DURING Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University CHRISTA KNELLWOLF Researcher, Australian National University, Australia IAIN MCCALMAN Director of the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities JONATHAN MEE Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College, Oxford PETER OTTO Lecturer, University of Melbourne, Australia NICOLA PARSONS Department of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia MARC SERGE RIVIRE Professor of French, University of Limerick, Ireland CHANTAL THOMAS Directrice de Recherche, Conseil National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Lyons, France PATRICK WALD LASOWSKI Universite de Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint-Denis) KATHLEEN WILSON Professor of History, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA

About the Author:

LISA O'CONNELL is a lecturer in Eighteenth-Century British literature and culture at the University of Queensland. She has published articles on the links between marriage practices and the theatre, recreational tourism, the novel, and popular ethnography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

PETER CRYLE is Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia. Much of his recent work is on the history of erotic narrative in French. His publications include Geometry in the Boudoir, The Telling of the Act, and La Crise du Plaisir: 1740-1830.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1403917639
• ISBN 13: 9781403917638
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 267
• Editor: O'Connell L., Cryle P.