The making of Victorian sexuality

著者

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The making of Victorian sexuality

Michael Mason

Oxford University Press, 1994

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注記

Includes bibliography (p. [299]-330) and index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet what did the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the most persistent cliches of modern times. Drawing on a wealth of sources from popular and professional medical and scientific texts to fiction, evangelical writing, and the work of radicals such as Godwin and Mill, Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to be in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The `average' Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois `paterfamilias' of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian twentieth century, this lively and fascinating study offers a radical challenge to one of the most persistent myths of our age.

目次

  • 1. Locating Responsibility: i. The Alien Victorians ii. A Developing Stigma iii. The First Theory of Nineteenth-Century Respectability iv. Radical Genteelness. 2. Sex in the Society: i. Can Sexual Moralism be Detected? ii. Getting Married and Conceiving Children iii. Illegitimacy and Premarital Sex iv. Illicit Unions. 3. Codes and Classes: i. Class Structure ii. Elite and Bourgeois sexuality iii. The Growth of Working-class Respectability iv. Meanings v. The Real Victorians. 4. Carnal Knowledge: i. Doctors and Patients ii. Women's Sexuality iii. Masturbating Men iv. Celibacy versus Marriage. 5. Quantifying Sexuality: i. 'Conclusive Facts' ii. Home Truths iii. Environmentalism iv. The Case of Robert Malthus v. Carnal Knowledge. Appendix I: English Classes
  • Appendix II: Working-Class Housing
  • Appendix III: The Medical Standing of Spermatorrhea.

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