The female thermometer : eighteenth-century culture and the invention of the uncanny / Terry Castle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Castle, Terry.

Series:

Ideologies of desire

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Gothic revival (Literature)--Great Britain.

Gothic revival (Literature).

Great Britain.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Women and literature.

History.

Romanticism--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Romanticism.

Femininity in literature.

Sex (Psychology) in literature.

Supernatural in literature.

Physical Description:

278 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Summary:

The Female Thermometer collects Castle's essays on phantasmagoria in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer," an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores the ways in which the rationalist imperatives of the age paradoxically worked to produce what Freud called the uncanny and what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination.

Castle offers a haunting portrait of a remarkable epoch, with essays on doubling and fantasy in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic fiction, sexual impersonators, the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science. The Female Thermometer explores the links between material culture, gender, and the rise of modern forms and formulas of subjectivity, effectively rewriting the cultural history of modern Europe from a materialist and feminist perspective.

Contents:

2 The Female Thermometer 21

3 "Amy, Who Knew my Disease": A Psychosexual Pattern in Defoe's Roxana 44

4 Lovelace's Dream 56

5 "Matters Not Fit to be Mentioned": Fielding's The Female Husband 67

6 The Culture of Travesty: Sexuality and Masquerade in Eighteenth-Century England 82

7 The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative 101

8 The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho 120

9 Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie 140

10 Spectral Politics: Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination 168

11 Contagious Folly: An Adventure and Its Skeptics 190.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195080971

019508098X

OCLC:

31011820