Imagining Sex Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England

by Toulalan, Sarah

• ISBN13: 9780199209149
• ISBN10: 0199209146
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England. It explores a wide variety of written material from the period to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it one that was usually subject at this time to suppression. Pornographic writing was a widespread feature of a range of texts, including both popular literature (ballads, news-sheets, court reports, small books, and pamphlets) as well as poetry, drama and more specialised medical books. The book analyses representations of sex, sexuality and eroticism in historical context to explore contemporary thinking about these issues, but also about broader cultural concerns and shifts in attitudes. It questions both modern feminist and psychoanalytical interpretations of pornography, arguing that these approaches are neither appropriate nor helpful to an understanding of seventeenth-century material. Through discussions of sex and reproduction, homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, and humour, the book explores the nature of early modern sexual desire and arousal and explores their relationship to contemporary understandings about how the body worked. Imagining Sex presents a radically new interpretation of pornography in this period, arguing that concerns about fertility were at the heart of representations of bodies and sex, so that images of pleasure were entwined with ideas about conception and reproduction. It also shows that these texts legitimized the (sexual) pleasure of the reader by highlighting the pleasure of looking and the incitement to sexual action that it provided.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The circulation of texts

publishers and readers

'Copulation is a conjunction of male and female EL with an ejection of seed to beget their likeness'

reproduction and sexual pleasure

'As pain borders on pleasure, so pleasure borders on pain'

fantasies of sexual flagellation

'An extraordinary Satisfaction'

imagining homosexuality

'Erotopolis'

voyeurism and the illusion of privacy

'Unexpected Bed Fellows'

the comic and the erotic

'The Naked Truth'

Images of bodies and sex

Conclusion

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