Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Eroticism and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
Chapter 1
Imperfect Enjoyments: Errors of the Imagination in Restoration England
Chapter 2
“Too great Warmth”: Joseph Addison, Eliza Haywood, and the Pleasures of Reading
Chapter 3
“Something greatly awful”: What Sex Does in Early Novels
Chapter 4
Sex as Form: The Aesthetic Pedagogies of John Cleland and William Hogarth
Coda
Philosophy’s Erotic Forms
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Kathleen Lubey is associate professor of English at St. John's University.

Reviews

Kathleen Lubey, in this provocative and . . . exciting study, attempts to explain the erotics of reading through the century following 1660. If there were a period of English literature in which erotics would offer the most appropriate ground for a study, this would surely be it. Lubey uses philosophical and proto-psychological material as an entrée into her topic, and at times she outlines key features of the reading experience that allow her to generalize about responses to a range of writing from Pepys and John Cleland to works in other genres by authors/artists such as William Hogarth. . . .Excitable Imaginations is a great book.
*Eighteenth-Century Fiction*

Excitable Imaginations gave me new ways of seeing many of the images and texts that I draw upon in my history course on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sexualities. I highly recommend it.
*Journal of the History of Sexuality*