Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London
Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London
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A 'Deluge of Libertinism' swept through England in the turbulent seventeenth century: class and gender relations went into deep crisis, and sexually explicit literature took the blame. Bridging periods often kept apart, Libertines and Radicals analyses English sexual culture between the Civil Wars and the death of Charles II in great detail. James Grantham Turner examines a broad range of Civil War and Restoration texts, from sex-crime records to Milton's epics and Rochester's 'mannerly obscene' lyrics. Turner places special emphasis on women's writing and on pornographic texts like The Wandering Whore and The Parliament of Women, flavoured with cockney humour or 'Puritan' indignation. Throughout, Turner reads satirical texts, whether political or pornographic, as an attempt to neutralize women's efforts to establish their own institutions and their own voice. This exhaustive study will be of interest to cultural historians as well as literary scholars.
- Analyses a broad range of texts
- This book offers an alternative understanding of obscenity and pornography
- Explores the connection between sex, violence, and political anxiety in early modern culture
Reviews & endorsements
"Libertines and Radicals is unquestionably a major contribution to our understanding of libertinism in the age of Milton..." Milton Quarterly
"An ambitious and innovative book." Seventeeth-Century News
"The mass and diversity of materials Turner covers is awesome....Turner's scholarship will be mined by students and scholars in any number of fields...and those readers will also discover here a model of brilliance and intellectual tact." Choice
"Libertines and Radicals is an impressive, suggestive, and elegant work that makes an important contribution to political, cultural, and literary studies." Albion
"The writing is racy and polished, leaping from anecdote to text to archive, and back again...required reading for any student of Restoration literature." Renaissance Quarterly
"Learned and lubricious, the book is witty, exceedingly well informed, and a little bit obscene." Studies in English Literature
Product details
December 2001Hardback
9780521782791
368 pages
236 × 159 × 24 mm
0.635kg
10 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and frequently cited works
- 1. Pornographia and the markings of prostitution: an introduction
- 2. Ceremonies of abjection: sex, politics and the disorderly subculture
- 3. 'The posture of a free state': political pornography and the 'commonwealth of women', 1640–1660
- 4. The wandering whore's return: the carnivalization of sexuality in the early Restoration
- 5. Monstrous assemblies: bawdy-house riots, 'libertine libels' and the royal mistress
- 6. 'Making yourself a beast': upper-class riot and inversionary wit in the age of Rochester
- Epilogue: 'In Bathsheba's Embraces old': pornographia rediviva at the close of Charles II's reign
- Notes
- Index.
