The representation of female desire in early modern pornographic texts, 1660-1745.

Howe grounds her study in up-to-date scholarship on women writers of early modern Spain as well as medieval scholarship that elucidates the possibilities

In contrast, Hoby’s record of her detailed but subjectively opaque daily activities anxiously measures her distance from a template of a well-lived Christian life. In Clifford’s diary, worldly affairs outshine the spiritual events, and, unlike Mildmay and Hoby, she often considers her spiritual life only in reaction to her secular troubles. The final chapter on women’s wills similarly comprises...

Title: ‘The Act of Copulation being Ordain'd by nature as the ground of all Generation’: fertility and the representation of sexual pleasure in seventeenth-century pornography in England

To a modern reader pornography and the representation of reproduction are mutually exclusive, despite their common subject matter: sex. But seventeenth-century pornographic texts do not conform to modern ideas about the nature of pornography. Sexual intercourse is defined as for the purpose of procreation with cataclysmic consequences resulting from its avoidance. In this period the pleasures o...

Pre-Modern and Early Modern Persian Literature: Written while Travelling?

In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

Representation of Gender and Space in Historical Texts from the Ilkhanid Period

Many texts in various fields were written in the Ilkhanid period which by examining them, it would be possible to obtain a clear understanding of the social and political situation of the period in question. Three historical texts will be discussed in this research which narrate political history of the Mongols: Tārikh-e Jahāngoshāy-e Jovaini as a first document written in early Ilkhanid period...

Aretino's Legacy: L'Ecole des filles and the Pornographic Continuum in Early Modern France