Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture:

Sex, Commerce and Morality

---

Editors: Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis

The Body, Gender and Culture

This collection of essays focuses on the variety of ways in which those involved in the sex trade – from courtesans and kept women to actresses and streetwalkers – were represented in eighteenth-century literature and popular culture.

Sample pages

• Introduction
• Index

Readership

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Literary Studies (including Comparative Literature), French Studies, English Studies, Social and Cultural History, History of Sexuality and Gender Studies

Contents

Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture – Markman Ellis and Ann Lewis
Part I: (Auto)Biographical and Classificatory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
1 Classifying the Prostitute in Eighteenth-Century France – Ann Lewis
2 Confessions of an Eighteenth-Century Madame: Marie-Madeleine Dossement and her Brothel – Kathryn Norberg
3 ‘All the World Knows Her Storie’: Aphra Behn and the Duchess of Mazarin (1646–99) – Claudine van Hensbergen
4 Marie Petit’s Persian Adventure (1705–8): The Eastward Travels of a French ‘Concubine’ – Katherine MacDonald
5 ‘A First-Rate Whore’: Prostitution and Empowerment in the Early Eighteenth Century – Lena Olsson
Part II: Visibility & Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
6 Prostitutes and Erotic Performances in Eighteenth-Century Paris – Thomas Wynn
7 Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ – Charlotte Grant
8 The Making of Candide’s Paquette – Edward Langille
9 The Prostitute as Neo-Manager: Sade’s Juliette and the 'New' Spirit of Capitalism – Olivier Delers
Part III: The Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
10 Asylum, Reformatory or Penitentiary? Secular Sentiments vs Proto-Evangelical Religion in The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) – Mary Peace
11 Mothers and Others: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narratives – Jennie Batchelor
Part IV: Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
12 Making a Living by ‘Indecency’: Life Stories of Prostitutes in Christiania, Norway – Johanne Bergkvist
13 Male Prostitution in Traditional and Modern Sexual Systems – Randolph Trumbach

Related titles

• Anti-Jacobin Novels
• Chawton House Library: Women's Memoirs
• Eighteenth-Century British Erotica
• Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part II
• Memoirs of Scandalous Women
• Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality
• The Prostitute's Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain
• Sex in Japan's Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation-Building
• The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House
• Whore Biographies, 1700–1825

Return to top

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•