Explore the vast range of titles available.

Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate. Mackie traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order. In Evelina’s Lord Orville, Clarissa’s Lovelace, Rookwood’s Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Decried as a misogynist and pornographer, imprisoned for debauchery and for his writings, there is scarcely a cultural figure as flamboyant and controversial as the Marquis de Sade, the father of the new libertine body. But this is not the only way to see Sade. In this long-awaited English translation, Hénaff says that Sade should be discussed less for the sensual heat of his writing and more for the larger poetic and economic model his work represents.

The monograph explores traditions of expressing the body and sexuality (designated as \"silence\" and \"burlesque\") throughout Russia's literary history, with a particular focus on how these traditions affect the literary modernization during the Silver Age (1890-1921) and subsequent émigré writing.

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.

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.

This essay argues for a renewed understanding of the politics of aestheticism by looking at texts by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne that comment upon contemporary European street battles and nationalist struggles. Writing out of frustration over the conservative reaction to the 1848 revolutions, Rossetti and Swinburne approach the political event through the imagery of erotic desire, which becomes for them a means of commenting on the false promises of political liberators and identifying the sources of individual and collective political energies. Rather than serving as a form of escape from political realities, aestheticism provides an innovative language for characterizing the politics of private life and the personal and emotional investments underlying political change.

Here, Gustafson assesses the broader literary and political contexts of Ricahrd Steele and John Dennis' debate over the fate of the Restoration rake, particularly insofar as the modernization of theatrical culture coincides with a simultaneous modernization in the political history of subjectivity during the transitional period between Stuart and Hanoverian rule. Theater historian Robert D Hume has questioned the teleological narrative in which the later Stuart libertine dramas by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, or Behn are replaced by sentimental or bourgeois comedy in the 1710s. Such accounts, Hume argues, do not consider that the London stages at the time functioned as repertory theaters; nor do they effectively \"reckon with the old plays that dominated the repertory at all times.\" Hume's observation implicitly suggests that new modes of drama like The Conscious Lovers are not the only aesthetic artifacts that might condition or reflect concurrent modernizations in political ideology.

The Marquis de Sade made a career out of titillating his readers with lavish descriptions of what could and should take place in a libertine boudoir. In several instances, he chooses to hide the specifics of what happened in these locations, preferring to allow the reader to draw his own conclusions of what might be taking place. While the boudoir was an established concept by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Sadean boudoir plays with its traditional meaning, removing the idea of a female-centered space of relaxation and re-placing it with a protected space for libertine exploration. Close reading of Sade's most famous works demonstrates how he both reveals and conceals the boudoir as a privileged site for punishment, pleasure, education, and, ultimately, as a site of seduction for and of the reader. As an author, Sade also plays with the taboos associated with the boudoir. While he is willing to describe the rooms' furnishings and amenities, he frequently keeps the activities that take place here a closely guarded secret. As readers, we must ask ourselves why he chooses to treat the boudoir as he does. Is it merely to titillate the reader, or does he have deeper motives for his portrayal of this room?

Morrison talks about the rhetoric of Luck in Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946). The novel examines the terrain of female experience between the acquisition of sexual maturity and marriage. It is clear that the topoi of female survival and female ambition are central to this trilogy of books, and in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the framing questions of America and American politics complicate and extend these topoi. The anti-sentimental picaresque offered Stead an opportunity to return to the satirical energy that is so remarkable in House of All Nations (1938), to experiment with New York vernacular, and to anatomize various American dilemmas as she saw them: a materialistic and weak middle-class obsessed with easy success, the irritant of fake radicalism in the New York Left, and the irresistible rise and rise of gangster capitalism. Stead's use of \"luck\" highlights the episodic and contingent events that make up the life of her anti-heroine, but also provides a rhetorical focal point for her critique of sex and politics. \"Luck\" is a word at the heart of the novel's purpose as well as its action.

Despite Sade's continuous refrain of \"il faut tout dire,\" his chef-d'oeuvre contains numerous moments of accepted silence and secret activities, seemingly in direct contrast with the copious details presented in other sections of the work. Given that none of the characters is Sade's intended student, it is clear that he plans to instruct his readers, using Les Cent vingt journées as a libertine primer.\\n In the former case, Sade has fulfilled his goals; in the latter, the reader is induced to learn more or to use the previously disclosed activities to formulate a Sadean hypothesis explaining the gaps.