Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture:

Sex, Commerce and Morality

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Editors: Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis

The Body, Gender and Culture

Prostitutes and prostitution were notoriously visible in eighteenth-century culture. Commonly understood as an indication of the moral temperature of society, the period saw profound changes in the way prostitution was represented in literary and visual 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 the literary and popular culture of the time, across different art forms and highlighting contradictory interpretations.

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: Critical Histories – Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis
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 Strategies of Empowerment in the Early Eighteenth Century – Lena Olsson
II: Visibility & Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
6 Prostitutes and Erotic Performances in Eighteenth-Century Paris – Tom 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
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 Preventing Prostitution: Radical Re-Imaginings of Marriage in
‘Histories of Some of the Penitents of the Magdalen-House’ (1759) and ‘Thelyphthora’ (1780) – Megan Hiatt
12 Mothers and Others: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narratives – Jennie Batchelor
IV: Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
13 Making a Living by ‘Indecency’: Life Stories of Prostitutes in Christiania, Norway – Johanne Bergvist
14 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
• The Prostitute's Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain
• The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House
• Whore Biographies, 1700–1825

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