KAREN HARVEY. Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 3.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 261. $75.00

Abstract

In this important book Karen Harvey demonstrates how an understanding of erotic culture challenges a number of grand narratives that social and cultural historians have posited for the eighteenth century. Harvey distinguishes erotica from pornography by arguing that the former “depicted sex, bodies and desire through illusions of concealment and distance: bodies were represented through metaphor and suggestion, and depictions of sexual activity were characterized by deferral and silence,” whereas the latter was concerned with the “explicit depiction of sexual action” (pp. 20–21). Through her detailed analysis of a wide range of erotic material, Harvey questions assumptions that the eighteenth century was either a period of control and restraint, characterized by politeness, or a time of unprecedented sexual license and pleasure. She argues instead that erotic culture exemplifies how both could be achieved within eighteenth-century society: erotic literature was about sex and celebrated sexual pleasure, but it was enjoyed within all-male sociable environments such as the coffee-house and club, which had a reputation for refinement and civility. In contrast to pornography, and given that the reader of erotic literature had to decipher sexual meanings from a variety of classical and botanical metaphors, its enjoyment was more of an intellectual exercise than one that was intended to bring about immediate physical gratification.