Excitable Imaginations

Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 16601760

By (author) Kathleen Lubey

Hardback - £93.00

Publication date:

27 September 2012

Length of book:

286 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611484403

Excitable Imaginations offers a new approach to the history of pornography. Looking beyond a counter-canon of bawdy literature, Kathleen Lubey identifies a vigilant attentiveness to sex across a wide spectrum of literary and philosophical texts in eighteenth-century Britain. Esteemed public modes of writing such as nationalist poetry, moral fiction, and empirical philosophy, as well as scandalous and obscene writing, persistently narrate erotic experiences—desire, voyeurism, seduction, orgasm. The recurring turn to sexuality in literature and philosophy, she argues, allowed authors to recommend with great urgency how the risqué delights of reading might excite the imagination to ever greater degrees of educability on moral and aesthetic matters. Moralists such as Samuel Richardson and Adam Smith, like their licentious counterparts Rochester, Haywood, and Cleland, purposefully evoke salacious fantasy so that their audiences will recognize reading as an intellectual act that is premised on visceral pleasure. Eroticism in texts like Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, in Lubey’s reading, did not compete with instructive literary aims, but rather was essential to the construction of the self-governing Enlightenment subject.
Kathleen Lubey, in this provocative and . . . exciting study, attempts to explain the erotics of reading through the century following 1660. If there were a period of English literature in which erotics would offer the most appropriate ground for a study, this would surely be it. Lubey uses philosophical and proto-psychological material as an entrée into her topic, and at times she outlines key features of the reading experience that allow her to generalize about responses to a range of writing from Pepys and John Cleland to works in other genres by authors/artists such as William Hogarth. . . .Excitable Imaginations is a great book.