Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment

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Laura Jean Rosenthal, Mita Choudhury
Bucknell University Press, 2002 - History - 292 pages
The essays demonstrate how profoundly eighteenth-century formulations of gender, race, class, and sexuality have, through their challenges to a less empirical, rational, and universalizing past, set the terms for debates in the centuries that followed. They explore a wide range of texts, from Georgic poetry to crime stories, from illness narratives to travel journals, from theatrical performances to medical discourse, and from political treatises to the novel."--BOOK JACKET.
 

Contents

Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures
25
Eroticism Performance and Privacy from Pepys to the Spectator
45
Sexual Monstrosity and the Suffering of Poor Children in the Brownrigg Murder Case
66
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu the Smallpox Inoculation and the Concept of Enlightenment
85
Narratives of Illness Histories of Presence 1812 1993
110
Christian Wilhelm Dohm and the Regeneration of the Jews
132
Galland Burton and the Arabian Nights
151
Matthew Lewiss Journal of a West India Proprietor
170
Transracial Prostitution in the South Seas and Back
189
Tropical Bounty Local Knowledge and the Imperial Georgic
211
Jane Austen and British Imperialism
231
Fact Fantasy or Mimesis? Narratives of FreedomImperial Masquerades
255
Contributors
276
Index
279
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Page 13 - The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress. On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice, on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population.
Page 38 - When I threw my eye towards the next woman to her, Will spoke what I looked, according to his romantic imagination, in the following manner: "Behold, you who dare, that charming virgin! behold the beauty of her person chastised by the innocence of her thoughts. Chastity, good-nature, and affability are the graces that play in her countenance; she knows she is handsome, but she knows she is good. Conscious beauty adorned with conscious virtue! What a spirit is there in those eyes ! What a bloom in...

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