Erotica and the Enlightenment

Download or read book Erotica and the Enlightenment written by Peter Wagner and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1991 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection focus on the relations between erotic, discourse and ideologies or «mentalités» in the Enlightenment. Although the contributors - literary historians, historians, and art historians - differ in approach and methodology, their common ground is the analysis of various genres of Enlightenment discourse on sex. There is a particular stress on popular writings (sex guides; obscene satire; graphic erotica), which have been neglected by literary historians, as well as on the iconographic discourse in works of art. Approaching eighteenth-century culture on such a broad basis, the essays try to retrieve parts of a «lost world», i.e. the complicated relations between the literary and popular discourse, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ideologies and «mentalités» contained in or opposed to this discourse. The contributions thus shed light on important aspects of an age which determined the modern period.