Erotica and the Enlightenment

The essays in this collection focus on the relations between erotic, discourse and ideologies or -mentalites- 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 -mentalites- contained in or opposed to this discourse. The contributions thus shed light on important aspects of an age which determined the modern period."