Provides an examination of the use of human sexuality in classic literary works.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Interest in politeness in the eighteenth century is shown to reflect anxiety about social change and indicate a search for guidelines in a newly commercialized society. Evident is the dilemma of poets such as Parnell, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Pope.

"Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room embodies contradictory connotations, linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet.

Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690-1755, complicates our understanding of eighteenth-century English print culture by studying the journalistic work of women writers who have long been overlooked by scholars, and by re-interpreting texts by canonical male authors in the period as responses to these early feminist models of cultural authority.

Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography of Georges Bataille, and the theories of Julia Kristeva.