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This paper investigates a prominent issue in scholarship on one of the best known late Tang poets, Du Mu 杜牧 (803-ca. 852): his traditional image as a libertine, which has been overshadowed the research on his life and works from the pre-modern era to today. Through careful textual and intertextual analyses of various versions of three major anecdotes about Du Mu, associated respectively with the locations of Yangzhou 揚州, Luoyang 洛陽, and Huzhou 湖州, this paper traces the development of the \"anecdotal Du Mu,\" concluding that his libertine image took shape from the stories and was primarily a reading of later scholars. Beyond its new interpretations of the anecdotes with regard to the traditional libertine image of a specific poet, this study also aims to prompt reconsideration of his poems, and illuminate the dynamic between history and literature in the development of Chinese literary criticism.

Are sex scandals simply trivial distractions from serious issues or can they help democratize politics? In 1820, George IV's \"royal gambols\" with his mistresses endangered the Old Oak of the constitution. When he tried to divorce Queen Caroline for adultery, the resulting scandal enabled activists to overcome state censorship and revitalize reform. Looking at six major British scandals between 1763 and 1820, this book demonstrates that scandals brought people into politics because they evoked familiar stories of sex and betrayal. In vibrant prose woven with vivid character sketches and illustrations, Anna Clark explains that activists used these stories to illustrate constitutional issues concerning the Crown, Parliament, and public opinion. Clark argues that sex scandals grew out of the tension between aristocratic patronage and efficiency in government. For instance, in 1809 Mary Ann Clarke testified that she took bribes to persuade her royal lover, the army's commander-in-chief, to promote officers, buy government offices, and sway votes. Could women overcome scandals to participate in politics? This book also explains the real reason why the glamorous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, became so controversial for campaigning in a 1784 election. Sex scandal also discredited Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first feminists, after her death. Why do some scandals change politics while others fizzle? Edmund Burke tried to stir up scandal about the British empire in India, but his lurid, sexual language led many to think he was insane. A unique blend of the history of sexuality and women's history with political and constitutional history,Scandalopens a revealing new window onto some of the greatest sex scandals of the past. In doing so, it allows us to more fully appreciate the sometimes shocking ways democracy has become what it is today.

Based on fresh archival discoveries, this article reveals the previously untold story of the translation and circulation of Sade's works among English readers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Conventional wisdom has been that only a select few read Sade before the twentieth century, but this article traces Sade's reception among English Gothic novelists, the circulation of his works by the pornographers of Holywell Street, and previously undiscovered translations of the 1830s and 1840s. Sade was read by the Victorians in far greater numbers than ever since in France or England—and they did so without realizing it.

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.

This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised \"golden means\" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.

Female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages: An idea-historical survey. This article presents an idea-historical survey of attitudes towards women who were involved in same-sex relations from the middle of the 11th century to the middle of the 15th century, how these attitudes manifested themselves in later Medieval societies and what the reflections about these women involved at the time. Taking as its premise the inclusion of ‘female sodomy’ in an extensive 11th-century (per Damian’s Liber gomorrhianus, 1049) articulation of ‘sodomy’ as every possible form of ‘irrational fornication’, and employing Foucault’s critique of modern, heteronormative scientia sexualis, themes presented in the article include the 11th-century construction of gender-inclusive ‘sodomy’ and the postulation of ‘the female sodomite’, the distinction between simple and complex taboos, transgressing and transcending modes of resistance to complex taboos, four significant developments during the 12th century (the subtle heterosexual distinction between male and female homosexuality, the critique of marriage as an institution, female same-sex relations as an agency for social change and a platform for the initial economical emancipation of women), the rise of the libertine beguine orders in the first decades of the 13th century, and ‘uniformity’, ‘homogenity’, as well as the rise of ‘minorities’ (including the ‘sexual minority’) within the characteristic cultural intolerance of the 14th and early-15th centuries. The historical development of ideas regarding female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages must in the end be indicated as part of a regressive Medieval prelude to modern scientia sexualis. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This idea-historical survey of female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages impacts numerous disciplines and sub-disciplines, inter alia Medieval Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, History of Ideas, Medieval History, Church History, Sociology, Dogmatics, Practical Theology and Philosophy of Religion.

The critical reception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) often circles around two related questions: its relationship to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and the implications of its classical 'compilation' soundtrack. Revisiting both, this article challenges the pervasive emphasis in existing musicological literature on the film's use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by offering a formal analysis of its excerpts by (among others) Rossini, Elgar and Purcell. A fresh look at Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695) serves to open a dramatic lineage leading back to the seventeenth-century 'Don Juan' archetype, which brings in tow the vast musicological literature on Don Giovanni along with philosophical accounts from Kierkegaard through Bernard Williams. The film's notorious references to Gene Kelly's dance routine in Singin' in the Rain (1952) add to its confrontation with individual and collective ideals of 'liberty' a cinematic reflexivity that can serve (with some help from Marshall McLuhan's influential 1964 study Understanding Media) to shed new light on Luis Buñuel's assertion that this is 'the only movie about what the modern world really means'.

This article compares the poetic output of the Anglo-Canadian writer Irving Layton with that of the famous Restoration rake and court poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Layton himself provided the connection in his wholehearted vindication of the seventeenth century as a time of “intellectual ferment”, “criticism and impatience for change”. Layton’s debt to Nietzsche and Rochester’s to his contemporary philosopher Hobbes, respectively, provide the thread through which a striking similarity of values and thematic concerns, of the quality of the amatory experience described; of their criticism of mankind, its institutions and even of themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other, of shared poetic formulas, sources of inspiration (classical, Elizabethan, satiric) and idiom string together in creative work that displays quite striking affinities, the product of similar vital stances.

Female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages: An idea-historical survey. This article presents an idea-historical survey of attitudes towards women who were involved in same-sex relations from the middle of the 11th century to the middle of the 15th century, how these attitudes manifested themselves in later Medieval societies and what the reflections about these women involved at the time. Taking as its premise the inclusion of ‘female sodomy’ in an extensive 11th-century (per Damian’s Liber gomorrhianus , 1049) articulation of ‘sodomy’ as every possible form of ‘irrational fornication’, and employing Foucault’s critique of modern, heteronormative scientia sexualis , themes presented in the article include the 11th-century construction of gender-inclusive ‘sodomy’ and the postulation of ‘the female sodomite’, the distinction between simple and complex taboos, transgressing and transcending modes of resistance to complex taboos, four significant developments during the 12th century (the subtle heterosexual distinction between male and female homosexuality, the critique of marriage as an institution, female same-sex relations as an agency for social change and a platform for the initial economical emancipation of women), the rise of the libertine beguine orders in the first decades of the 13th century, and ‘uniformity’, ‘homogenity’, as well as the rise of ‘minorities’ (including the ‘sexual minority’) within the characteristic cultural intolerance of the 14th and early-15th centuries. The historical development of ideas regarding female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages must in the end be indicated as part of a regressive Medieval prelude to modern scientia sexualis . Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This idea-historical survey of female same-sex relations in the later Middle Ages impacts numerous disciplines and sub-disciplines, inter alia Medieval Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, History of Ideas, Medieval History, Church History, Sociology, Dogmatics, Practical Theology and Philosophy of Religion.