This proposed special session will examine relationships between religion
and sexuality in English literature throughout the long eighteenth century,
focusing on ways in which these discourses helped construct the modern
sexual subject.
Scholars have long studied the eighteenth century as a period of great
religious strife and enthusiasm that ultimately saw the accommodation of a
variety of religious perspectives, including Anglicans, Catholics, Jews,
Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists, into the English cultural
landscape. Historians and literary scholars have also suggested that a
sexual revolution simultaneously occurred, though they have not agreed on
its consequences. On the one hand, Tim Hitchcock argues that this
revolution "resulted in a transition from a form of sex in which the
interests of both individuals plays a substantive part, to a form where the
male orgasm became the all important outcome." As a result, writes
Hitchcock, "Men, newly concerned about their penises, were in a very
restricted sense, liberated; while women, biologically redefined in order
to deny them a sexual role, were repressed and their sexual activity was
more heavily policed." On the other hand, Michael McKeon maintains that
"personal worth was relocated in the common woman, the repository of a
normative honor that had been alienated from an undeserving male
aristocracy and that would be apotheosized in the domestic virtues of the
modern heterosexual family." Topics might include any of the issues raised
by these scholars or other facets of religious belief and practice and
sexual identity and behavior during the eighteenth century.
Please email 1-page abstract and c.v. to Jeremy Webster at
[log in to unmask] by March 15th.
Jeremy W. Webster
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Ohio University
[log in to unmask]
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