Read more
Love in all its cultural and personal complexity is the focus of this book. While scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homoerotic culture have tended to focus on sexual behavior and the much-maligned figure of the sodomite, George E. Haggerty argues that the concepts of love and emotional intimacy offer a more useful perspective for understanding male-male relations of the time.
Haggerty considers male "identities" of many kinds: heroic friends, as found in seventeenth-century French romance and Restoration tragedy, and personal friends, as in the erotic relationships of Gray, Walpole, and West; fops and beaus, as depicted in Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedy and various satirical portraits; effeminate sodomites and mollies depicted in literature and sodomy trial accounts throughout the period; men of feeling and other figures in whom sensibility and sexuality are vividly interconnected. He also discusses libertines and sexual aggressors, especially as depicted in the pages of Gothic fiction.
List of contents
Introduction: Masculinity and Sexuality
Part 1: Masculinities
1. Heroic Friendships
2. Gay Fops/Straight Fops
3. Sensibility and Its Symptoms
Part 2: Sexualities
4. Gray's Tears
5. Beckford's Pederasty
6. Walpole's Secrets
About the author
George E. Haggerty
Summary
Arguing that the personally and culturally complex concepts of love and emotional intimacy offer a more useful perspective for understanding male-male relations of the eighteenth century than scholarship which focuses exclusively on sexual behavior, Haggerty examines several eighteenth -century archetypes of same-sex relations in which sensibility and sexuality emerge as interdependent.
