The Making of Victorian Sexuality

الغلاف الأمامي
Oxford University Press, 1994 - 338 من الصفحات
BL A challenging examination of Victorian sexuality. BL Confronts one of the most persistent historical cliches of modern times. BL Draws on a wealth of documentary evidence including medical, scientific, religious, demographic, and literary texts. At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet whatdid the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the most persistent cliches of modern times. Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to bein reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The `average' Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois `paterfamilias' of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic,radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian twentieth century, this lively and fascinating study offers a radical challenge to one of the most persistent myths of our age.

من داخل الكتاب

المحتوى

SEX IN THE SOCIETY
37
CODES AND CLASSES
105
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
175
حقوق النشر

1 من الأقسام الأخرى غير ظاهرة

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عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (1994)

Michael Mason has edited the Oxford Authors edition of William Blake (OPB, 1988), and is Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads (Longman, 1992), and Trollope: Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews (Arno 1981). He lives in Oxford.

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