Spectacle, Sex, and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture - AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century

Spectacle, Sex, and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture operates within a multiplicity of critical frameworks in order to uproot and follow strands of historical and cultural meaning in literature. The result brings together readings of tried and untried primary texts for a collection of cultural explications and historical positioning that seek to move us beyond both the weariness of worn critical paths and the elation of initial text recovery.

The essays in Part I examine the ways in which domestic, utopian, and theatrical spaces are negotiated both inside and outside of the text. Part II focuses on gender construction and sexuality in literature, particularly the ways in which gender helps and hinders the negotiation of personal agency and the projection of an individual voice or identity. The final section of essays explores the ownership and exchange of spectacle, sex, and property in diverse material and human forms. As Kirsten Saxton remarks in her afterword to this collection, “As a whole, the volume posits an overarching refusal of aesthetic or cultural or generic boundaries as fixed or ‘natural' while the individual essays simultaneously attend to the very real consequences of such boundaries, however imaginative their limits.”