University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 286
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-61148-440-3 • Hardback • September 2012 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-61148-586-8 • Paperback • June 2014 • $56.99 • (£44.00)
978-1-61148-441-0 • eBook • September 2012 • $54.00 • (£42.00)
Kathleen Lubey is associate professor of English at St. John's University.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Eroticism and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
Chapter 1
Imperfect Enjoyments: Errors of the Imagination in Restoration England
Chapter 2
“Too great Warmth”: Joseph Addison, Eliza Haywood, and the Pleasures of Reading
Chapter 3
“Something greatly awful”: What Sex Does in Early Novels
Chapter 4
Sex as Form: The Aesthetic Pedagogies of John Cleland and William Hogarth
Coda
Philosophy’s Erotic Forms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
— Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Excitable Imaginations gave me new ways of seeing many of the images and texts that I draw upon in my history course on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sexualities. I highly recommend it.
— Journal of the History of Sexuality