Overview

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous-and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law unto itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also analyzes the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond.

Full Product Details

Author:   James Steintrager (Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine)
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
Imprint:   Columbia University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.694kg
ISBN:  

9780231151580

ISBN 10:   0231151586
Pages:   408
Publication Date:   16 February 2016
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Whose Sexual Revolution? 1. A Thousand Modes of Venery: Coital Positions as Actions and Communications 2. Voluptuary Architecture: Organizing 3. Sodomy and Reason: Making Sense of the Libertine Preference 4. the obscene organ of brute pleasure : Social Functions of the Clitoris 5. The Fury of Her Kindness: What Should a Libertine Know About Orgasm? 6. Color and Caprice: The Politics and Aesthetics of Interracial Relations 7. Canonizing Sade: Eros, Democracy, and Differentiation Notes Index

Reviews

The Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present. -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's provocative and insightful book is an original, wide-ranging, well-argued, and substantive contribution to the field which successfully conjoins theoretical debates with current historical and literary scholarship. It is, moreover, engagingly and intelligently written--a pleasure to read. -- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University

The Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is richly and innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present. -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's provocative and insightful book is an original, wide-ranging, well-argued, and substantive contribution to the field which successfully conjoins theoretical debates with current historical and literary scholarship. It is, moreover, engagingly and intelligently written--a pleasure to read. -- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University

The Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present. -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's provocative and insightful book is an original, wide-ranging, well-argued, and substantive contribution to the field which successfully conjoins theoretical debates with current historical and literary scholarship. It is, moreover, engagingly and intelligently written-a pleasure to read. -- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University James Steintrager's original and persuasive study of Sade and the uses of Sade will be as stimulating to historians of sexuality, sex, and sexology as it will be to scholars and students of eighteenth-century French literature. His thesis - that Sade's position in the history of libertinage is distinctive, involving the promotion of pleasure as an autonomous sphere, free from all constraints, moral, legal, social, sthetic, rational - is sensitively argued, and he makes careful and interesting connections between Sade's liberation of sexual pleasure and twentieth-century sexual liberation. The Autonomy of Pleasure will also appeal to historians of visual culture with its excellent reproductions of eighteenth-century engravings, surrealist photographs and movie stills. -- Kate Tunstall, Associate Professor of French, University of Oxford Finally, a book that commands the intelligence and the erudition to tackle the thorny topic of libertinage. Steintrager gives its due to the French Enlightenment in the radicalization of pleasure under all its guises. But his book takes us from Classical Antiquity all the way to the sexual revolution of the sixties. We travel from Ovid to the infamous Marquis de Sade, who makes recurring appearances, to Foucault. A resounding critical exploit on a still intriguing topic and a bold assessment of the pitfalls of the discourse of sexuality. -- Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University

The Autonomy of Pleasure is an important work that adds richly to our understanding of libertine literature in eighteenth-century France and, more generally, of the culture of pleasure that emerged in aristocratic and leisurely social circles. James A. Steintrager's interpretation of libertinage is innovatively different from existing scholarship, weaving suggestively and cogently between the eighteenth-century context and the present. -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota Steintrager's provocative and insightful book is an original, wide-ranging, well-argued, and substantive contribution to the field that successfully conjoins theoretical debates with current historical and literary scholarship. It is, moreover, engagingly and intelligently written-a pleasure to read. -- Lynn Festa, Rutgers University Steintrager's original and persuasive study of the Marquis de Sade and the uses of Sade will be as stimulating to historians of sexuality, sex, and sexology as it will be to scholars and students of eighteenth-century French literature. The Autonomy of Pleasure will also appeal to historians of visual culture with its excellent reproductions of eighteenth-century engravings, surrealist photographs, and movie stills. -- Kate Tunstall, Associate Professor of French, University of Oxford Finally, a book that commands the intelligence and the erudition to tackle the thorny topic of libertinage. Steintrager gives its due to the French Enlightenment in the radicalization of pleasure under all its guises. But his book takes us from classical antiquity all the way to the sexual revolution of the sixties. We travel from Ovid to the infamous Marquis de Sade, who makes recurring appearances, to Foucault. A resounding critical exploit on a still intriguing topic and a bold assessment of the pitfalls of the discourse of sexuality. -- Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University

Author Information

James A. Steintrager is professor of English, comparative literature, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine.

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