Search results for ""Author Chris Mounsey""

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This fascinating and diverse collection of essays concerns the lives and representations of homosexuals in the long eighteenth century. The collection addresses and seeks to move beyond the current critical division between essentialists and social constructionists, a division that bedevils the history of sexuality and fissures Queer Theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as theoretical approaches, the essays explore canonical and non-canonical literature, scurrilous pamphlets and court cases, music, religion and politics, consumer culture and sexual subcultures. Eighteenth-century life is depicted here in all its rich variety, from the scandals surrounding Queen Anne to the struggles of laboring-class poets, and from the famous - Defoe, Handel, Boswell, Burney, and the Duchess of Devonshire - to the obscure male frequenters of Mother Clap's Molly House or the anonymous female participants in the extraordinary story of The She-Wedding.

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Presenting Gender engages with one of the most intriguing aspects of Early Modern and Enlightenment culture: gender passing, the phenomenon of passing oneself off as a member of the opposite biological sex. This collection of ten historically informed and theoretically sophisticated essays by European and American scholars employs "passing" as a pivotal practical, ideological, and textual term for investigating the relations among gender, sex, subjectivity, politics, and economics in a wide range of texts and social and cultural practices during the period 1600-1800. The relations between sex and gender, and biology and culture are found to be imbricated but not indissociable. Together, the contributors demonstrate that the identification of passing with sexual motivations suggested that the sexual body was perceived to be stable, though capable of being categorized into more than two sexes, while the association of passing with political motivations tended to privilege the body's cultural construction. At the same time, the contributors find a reverse set of polarities to be true for gender. Those who passed in early-modern and eighteenth-century culture for sexual reasons suggested that gender was unstable, while those who passed for political reasons suggested its stability. Rich in detail and methodologically rigorous, Presenting Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the shift from Renaissance and Restoration to Enlightenment understandings of identity generally, and sexual identity specifically, and will complicate the hitherto rather rigid periodization of the years 1600-1800.

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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century explores disabled people who lived in the eighteenth century. The first four essays consider philosophical writing dating between 1663 and 1788, when the understanding of disability altered dramatically. We begin with Margaret Cavendish, whose natural philosophy rejected ideas of superiority or inferiority between individuals based upon physical or mental difference. We then move to John Locke, the founder of empiricism in 1680, who believed that the basis of knowledge was observability, but who, faced with the lack of anything to observe, broke his own epistemological rules in his explanation of mental illness. Understanding the problems that empiricism set up, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, turned in 1711 to moral philosophy, but also founded his philosophy on a flaw. He believed in the harmony of “the aesthetic trinity of beauty, truth, and virtue” but he could not believe that a disabled friend, whom he knew to have been moral before his physical alteration, could change inside. Lastly, we explore Thomas Reid who in 1788 returned to the body as the ground of philosophical enquiry and saw the body as a whole—complete in itself and wanting nothing, be it missing a sense (Reid was deaf) or a physical or mental capacity. At the heart of the study of any historical artifact is the question of where to look for evidence, and when looking for evidence of disability, we have largely to rely upon texts. However, texts come in many forms, and the next two essays explore three types—the novel, the periodical and the pamphlet—which pour out their ideas of disability in different ways. Evidence of disabled people in the eighteenth century is sparse, and the lives the more evanescent. The last four essays bring to light little known disabled people, or people who are little known for their disability, giving various forms of biographical accounts of Susanna Harrison, Sarah Scott, Priscilla Poynton and Thomas Gills, who are all but forgotten in the academic world as well as to public consciousness.

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