Under the (Book) Covers: Sex in British Literature, 1748-present

3 ch (W) · Undergraduate

Explore the the wide-ranging representations of sex in British Literature from the long eighteenth century to the present and consider the aesthetics of intimacy in all its pleasures and pains. Study key novels, plays, poems, and pictorial narratives that reveal attitudes around sex, sexuality and gender from eighteenth-century life to our present day. Grapple with questions of the body; boundaries of the subject and the object; performativity; love, marriage, and breakups; the theatricalization of personal spaces; the affect of sex; abjection; objecthood; clumsy scenes; disappointment and resentment; obscenity, pornography, and censorship.