The Makings of Modern Sex

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

According to some historians and literary theorists, a fundamental shift in social attitudes toward sex took place in the eighteenth century. A body of literature spanning the entire century and a range of literary forms was produced to grapple with new ideas about gender roles, sexual violence, and previously taboo subjects like sexual orientation. But the details remain contested: was the eighteenth century a time of repression or revelation, and what do poems, dramas, novels, visual art, and treatises from that period tell us about our own inherited values and assumptions when we talk about sex? We will explore the ebbs and flows of a century that repeatedly tried and failed to control sexuality, with a particular focus on what was left unsaid, unexamined, and unpublished—in the case of Jeremy Bentham, for nearly 200 years. Primary texts by Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Alexander Pope, John Cleland, Jane Austen, Bentham, and others; critical texts by Michel Foucault, Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, Frances Ferguson, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Sandra Macpherson, and more.