“Critical Extasy”: Orgasm and Sensibility in<i>Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure</i>

Jagose, Annamarie

doi:10.1086/508215

Cited by 4 publications

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References 28 publications

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“…18 Such effects can be seen as typifying what Annamarie Jagose describes as 'that sympathetic connection between character and reader that underwrites the eighteenth-century sentimental novel's program of improvement'. 19 In its approving review of Evelina, the Critical Review implied just such a direct link between identification with a character and beneficial moral effects. It imagined a father recommending the novel to his daughters for its 'knowledge of the world and lessons of experience': they will weep and (what it is not so commonly the effect of novels) will laugh, and grow wiser, as they read; the experienced mother will derive pleasure and happiness from being present at its reading; even the sons of the family will forego the diversions of the town or the field to pursue the entertainment of Evelina's acquaintance, who will imperceptibly lead them, as well as their sisters, to improvement and to virtue.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Skinner

2021

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine

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Skinner explores the neglected role of breath in the mapping and understanding of eighteenth-century sensibility. Thematically rich in their associations with body and spirit, life and death, breath and breathlessness are also woven into the stylistic particularities of both sentimental and epistolary fiction. Examination of the epistolarity of Evelina, and the dramatic use of dialogue Burney became known for, reveals breathlessness as the signifier of intense and instinctive moral discernment of the kind described by eighteenth-century philosophers such as Frances Hutcheson, complicating the view that the heroine of epistolary fiction more generally, and Evelina in particular, is purely passive. Instead, she emerges as actively involved in numerous scenarios that at once challenge her capacity for moral conduct and allow her to demonstrate her power to act.

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confidence: 99%

‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Skinner

2021

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine

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Notes

Smith¹

2013

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

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An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London ‘The William Bynum Prize Essay’

Fernandes

2019

Med. Hist.

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This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the ‘communicability’ of the plague, great pox (syphilis) and smallpox (variola) was used by authors to crystallise social interaction and tension along class lines. The essay begins by examining the representation of the plague, syphilis and smallpox in the medical tradition, before shifting its attention to the practice of maritime quarantine, as laid out by Richard Mead in his Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720). By foregrounding medical writing on contagion through skin contact, I suggest that pornographic texts such as John Cleland’s The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) (1748) had an interventionist function. Cleland is often charged with sanitising the true horrors of sex work in this period. This article proposes that if we take the time to appreciate the way infectious cutaneous diseases were believed to operate and spread we can recognise the moments in which he not only alludes to disease but invokes it for structural and thematic purposes. In proposing this, I am challenging the dominant interpretation that the problematic realities of eighteenth-century prostitution, especially disease, are subordinated to the narrative’s greater interest in erotic pleasure.

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“Critical Extasy”: Orgasm and Sensibility inMemoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Cited by 4 publications

References 28 publications

‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

‘Spoken from the Impulse of the Moment’: Epistolarity, Sensibility, and Breath in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Notes

An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London ‘The William Bynum Prize Essay’

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