This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

This volume draws attention to some eighteenth-century figures who, by their mobility, their disrespect for authority, and in some cases their dishonesty, might once have been thought unworthy of scholarly attention. This book opposes the great thinkers of a supposedly monolithic Enlightenment to a peripheral world of radicals and miscreants and seeks to understand the coexistence, and to some degree the complicity, of a wide range of eighteenth-century "libertines" in the Enlightenment project. Through the study of a range of individuals --including female rakes and libertine whores (Con Phillips, Jeanne La Motte, Casanova's Henriette), the great thinkers (Voltaire, Kant, Goethe), and some of the most notorious adventurers and rebels (Wilkes, Casanova, Cagliostro, Sade)--this book reflects on the history of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the Europe that hosted it.

This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

Sex in the Eighteenth-century was not simply a pleasure; it had profound philosophical and political implications. This book explores those implications, and in particular the links between sexual freedom and liberty in a variety of European and British contexts. Discussing prostitutes and politicians, philosophers and charlatans, confidence tricksters and novelists, Libertine Enlightenment presents a fascinating overview of the sexual dimension of enlightened modernity.

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does and doesn't mean to be normal.

Viewing thematic writing as the differentiation and elaboration of cultural knowledge, P. M. Cryle applies this new kind of thematics to the commitment" most often mentioned by literary critics in connection with existentialist literature. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Viewing thematic writing as the differentiation and elaboration of cultural knowledge, P. M. Cryle applies this new kind of thematics to the commitment" most often mentioned by literary critics in connection with existentialist literature.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Telegraph" Todd became a legend in his own lifetime for introducing Australian colonists to a new information age. But only recently has the full extent of his many and varied achievements come to light.