Helen Williams | Northumbria University (original) (raw)
Papers by Helen Williams
Shandean, 2022
The Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal is addressed to Eliza Draper, comprising daily entries ... more The Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal is addressed to Eliza Draper, comprising daily entries between 13 April to 4 August 1767. Sterne captures in the journal a regular account of his suffering from consumption, or what we would now recognise as tuberculosis, recording in painstaking detail a range of encounters with medical professionals, his treatments, and his thoughts on patient experience. The regularity of such material, usually considered as the background to the content concerning Eliza or A Sentimental Journey, invites us to consider the journal’s literary form in a medical light, through the lens of ‘autopathography’, or subjective illness narrative, following Stella Bolaki’s suggestion that illness narratives combine (auto)biographical prose writing about living with a disease with reflections upon patient experience. In turning to recent theorisations of illness narrative, this essay thinks through Sterne’s journal in ways which complement and enlighten its multifariousness while underlining the centrality to the text of his representation of chronic illness.
https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/50281/
Criticism, 2022
Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibran... more Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibrantly printed dress fabrics, creating a collection that came to be called “the Cottonian Library.” This article is a manifesto for Cottonian bookbinding to be studied as feminist literary activism. It argues for the importance of looking beyond the book trades to the domestic and unremunerated ways in which women contributed to Romantic period book design, suggesting that the new feminist Craftivism can prompt us to historicize and to acknowledge the significance of Cottonian bookbinding as a practice that cannot be omitted from any history of women and the book.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol64/iss3/9
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
Eighteenth-century medical literature recommended that women record their menstrual cycles to ide... more Eighteenth-century medical literature recommended that women record their menstrual cycles to identify dates of conception, measure gestation, and predict delivery. Women's pocketbooks were natural repositories of such pregnancy-related data. This article charts the history of women's pocketbooks providing printed affordances for menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Throughout the eighteenth century, women's printed pocketbooks were self-conscious of, and began to make more obvious, their potential to assist the safe delivery of children. The first mass-produced tool for predicting childbirth, Anton F.A. Desberger's Schwangerschaftskalender (1827), translated into English as the Marriage Almanack in 1835, presupposed a female readership familiar with women's pocketbooks' self-conscious capacity to assist family planning.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth... more This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century' explores the various types of literary and visual creativity enacted by medical practitioners as they sought new ways of communicating and engaging with the public. Focusing on the shift from Latin to vernacular publishing in elite medical circles, we examine the proliferation of new opportunities open to physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, medical artists, midwives, and other women practitioners to express themselves. Novels, drama, poetry, artworks, almanacs, and letters, to name but a few creative products of the period, allowed new ideas and underrepresented voices to be heard for the first time, changing forever the way creative and empirical cultures would intertwine. Stemming from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660-1832 (2018-22), this research has undoubtedly been impacted by the rapidly changing nature of public healthcare in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that was still ongoing when this issue went to print. We value and celebrate connections made between the past and present that continue to assist us in understanding and caring for our bodies.
Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period (London: Palgrave), 2022
Ann Fisher (1719–1778), author of bestselling grammatical textbooks, co-founded and co-edited wit... more Ann Fisher (1719–1778), author of bestselling grammatical textbooks, co-founded and co-edited with her husband, Thomas Slack, the Newcastle Chronicle. Though she worked alongside him, and sometimes independently, in their Newcastle print shops, Fisher’s work as a printer-publisher remains underexplored. This chapter demonstrates her role in printing and publishing John Cunningham’s Poems, Chiefly Pastoral (1766 and 1772) and her own Ladies’ Own Memorandum-Book (1764–1778), unique in being the only women’s pocket book produced by a woman in this period. Drawing upon manuscript archives of correspondence in the British Library, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, and the National Library of Scotland, this chapter provides a rare insight into the professional practice of a female printer and publisher within a family business.
How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays, ed. by Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger, Methuen Drama (London: Bloomsbury), 2020
British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters, ed. by Mascha Hansen and Sebastien Domsch (London: Palgrave), 2021
From the 1770s onwards gravesites of characters from Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Trist... more From the 1770s onwards gravesites of characters from Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1791) appeared across Germany and in America. This essay traces the emergence of these graves as a unique form of literary afterlife, suggesting that they were a means by which readers could express the heightened sensibility characteristic of the sentimental novel tradition through communing with favourite dead characters and – whether through sociable pilgrimage or simply in imagination – other sentimental readers. Considering the characteristically tragic outcomes for female protagonists of the sentimental novel, the practice of grave-visiting depends on whilst also unpacking narratives which frame female sexuality, other than that which conveniently concludes with marriage, as tragedy. Graves to fictional characters therefore facilitated readers' quixotic mourning whilst holding the potential to provoke collective criticism of sentimental literary culture's framing of female sexuality without marriage as causing only social ostracism, suffering and death.
The Shandean, 2020
This essay argues that Sterne’s satire in A Political Romance pokes fun not just at the disagreem... more This essay argues that Sterne’s satire in A Political Romance pokes fun not just at the disagreement between lawyer Francis Topham and Dean of York John Fountayne, as is well known by Sterne scholars, but also at the role of a convivial club in that disagreement. Through analysing an early manuscript minute book of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s club previously unknown to scholars, the Good Humour Club of York (c.1724-1800), it will be demonstrated that nine of the club’s ninety-nine identified members were known to Sterne and that four of those were central to the pamphlet wars which climaxed with Sterne’s Political Romance in 1759. Sterne’s self-reflexivity in the Romance, through which he deconstructs his own satirical project and creates the self-consciousness perceived by scholars as anticipating the humour of Tristram Shandy, can be seen as a response to, and a satire of, the Good Humour Club’s involvement in local ecclesiastical affairs.
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2019
Our essay documents some of the issues we faced as modern editors of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a ... more Our essay documents some of the issues we faced as modern editors of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49). We were conscious of the groundbreaking earlier editions of Peter Sabor and Peter Wagner, and also of the particular difficulties posed by editing a text that was both the author’s first literary work and one that he subsequently repudiated. Our edition argues for the continuity of this early text with some of the concerns that become evident in Cleland’s later life and writings. In particular, we explore some of the novel’s many references to the physical health of its characters, such as Fanny’s mild smallpox in childhood, Mr. Norbert’s “flimsy consumptive texture,” and Mr. Crofts’s aggressive sexual impotence. We see these facets of the novel as being consistent with Cleland’s regular concern, evident from his letters, for the health of his friends, and his authorship in 1761 of the Institutes of Health, which details how individual well-being could be promoted by exercise, hygiene, and a good diet.
This article draws on the expanding terrain of digital newspaper archives to explore early advert... more This article draws on the expanding terrain of digital newspaper archives to explore early advertisements for Sterne's work. It situates its findings in relation to previous bibliographical studies to present a more contextual approach to how Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey were advertised during the 1760s. Comparing these small promotional texts with others produced for contemporaneous publications, and placing them within the broader context of publishing conventions in this period, this article shows that typical accounts of Sterne's 'originality' as found in his first reviews and in subsequent critical works was not always reflected in the often conventional nature of the advertisements of his novels. However, the authors conclude, perhaps these pared-back advertisements demonstrate all the more effectively the notorious celebrity both Sterne and his books had attained in the period of their first appearance.
Commemorating the death of Parson Yorick, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) ... more Commemorating the death of Parson Yorick, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) is often perceived as the preeminent symbol of his experimentation. But Sterne’s device may be less innovative than previously supposed, descending instead from two distinct traditions of depicting death in print: funeral literature and the typographic epitaph in the mid-century novel. In tracing inventive examples of memento mori iconography and identifying a profusion of novelistic epitaphs appearing during the 1740s and 1750s, this article situates the black page and Yorick’s epitaph in Sterne’s immediate literary context. In so doing, it demonstrates that his innovation in commemorating Yorick’s death lies in his deployment of a typesetting trend in the mid-century novel while simultaneously referencing a longstanding tradition of funeral publications. Through the mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph and the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, Sterne engages with the clichés of mourning iconography while playing on—and pushing to its limits—the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.
Notes & Queries, Sep 1, 2014
This article reveals two unknown letters by author John Cleland to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd ... more This article reveals two unknown letters by author John Cleland to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of
Rockingham. In this correspondence, Cleland deplores his want of patronage in his usual ungrateful and offensive manner whilst flattering himself that he might be an English Montesquieu, equally talented and similarly neglected by the powerful.
Review of English Studies, Mar 15, 2013
This article explores the relation between the eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland and the D... more This article explores the relation between the eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland and the Delaval family, occupants of Seaton Delaval Hall in north-east England. Cleland remains one of the most elusive literary figures in the eighteenth century, with paradoxically less being known about his life after he acquired fame (and notoriety) than before. Previous scholarship has surmised that his later years were spent in an embittered isolation from the world. Drawing on nine letters contained in the Delaval papers in Northumberland Archives, and also on financial accounts relating to John Hussey Delaval, we demonstrate the close link between Cleland and three different members of the Delaval family. This association provided a significant source of support for Cleland over the final four decades of his life, and the family emerge in our account as the only figures who could plausibly be described as his patrons. We also point to ways in which the Delaval letters shed light on Cleland’s journalistic career and on the nature of literary patronage in general during the later eighteenth century.
Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 2012
This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of h... more This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of his literary work through images of the hand and handwriting. It explores his experimentation with the typographic manicule and his innovation in representing script in print. I suggest that Sterne represents the hand and handwriting as ambiguous markers of authenticity in order to illustrate and lament the complexities of assigning literary property in this period.
The Publishing Lab, Jun 2013
Notes & Queries, Jan 6, 2013
Books by Helen Williams
Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings ... more Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings of his work based on meticulous examination of its material and bibliographical conditions. Alongside multiple editions and manuscripts of Sterne's own letters and works, a panorama of interdisciplinary sources are explored, including dance manuals, letter-writing handbooks, newspaper advertisements, medical pamphlets and disposable packaging. For the first time, this wealth of previously overlooked material is critically analysed in relation to the design history of Tristram Shandy, conceptualising the eighteenth-century novel as an artefact that developed in close conjunction with other media. In examining the complex interrelation between a period's literature and the print matter of everyday life, this study sheds new light on Sterne and eighteenth-century literature by re-defining the origins of his work and of the eighteenth-century novel more broadly, whilst introducing readers to diverse print cultural forms and their production histories.
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in Eng... more John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors’ prison, and the book’s manifestly lewd content led to its legal suppression within a year of publication. Though versions of the novel, nearly always abridged in some form, continued to find a way into print, the Memoirs remained an underground text until the 1960s. Only as that decade ushered in a culture less socially deferential and more sexually permissive was the moment opportune for the obscenity ban to be successfully challenged. Cleland’s novel is a triumph of literary style, resting on his invention of an entirely new, vividly metaphoric, terminology for describing sexual pleasure.
This Broadview Edition provides extensive materials on Cleland’s biography and career, contemporary censorship, and pornography and prostitution in the eighteenth century.
Shandean, 2022
The Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal is addressed to Eliza Draper, comprising daily entries ... more The Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal is addressed to Eliza Draper, comprising daily entries between 13 April to 4 August 1767. Sterne captures in the journal a regular account of his suffering from consumption, or what we would now recognise as tuberculosis, recording in painstaking detail a range of encounters with medical professionals, his treatments, and his thoughts on patient experience. The regularity of such material, usually considered as the background to the content concerning Eliza or A Sentimental Journey, invites us to consider the journal’s literary form in a medical light, through the lens of ‘autopathography’, or subjective illness narrative, following Stella Bolaki’s suggestion that illness narratives combine (auto)biographical prose writing about living with a disease with reflections upon patient experience. In turning to recent theorisations of illness narrative, this essay thinks through Sterne’s journal in ways which complement and enlighten its multifariousness while underlining the centrality to the text of his representation of chronic illness.
https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/50281/
Criticism, 2022
Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibran... more Edith Southey, Edith May Southey, and Sara Coleridge Jr. covered Robert Southey’s books in vibrantly printed dress fabrics, creating a collection that came to be called “the Cottonian Library.” This article is a manifesto for Cottonian bookbinding to be studied as feminist literary activism. It argues for the importance of looking beyond the book trades to the domestic and unremunerated ways in which women contributed to Romantic period book design, suggesting that the new feminist Craftivism can prompt us to historicize and to acknowledge the significance of Cottonian bookbinding as a practice that cannot be omitted from any history of women and the book.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol64/iss3/9
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
Eighteenth-century medical literature recommended that women record their menstrual cycles to ide... more Eighteenth-century medical literature recommended that women record their menstrual cycles to identify dates of conception, measure gestation, and predict delivery. Women's pocketbooks were natural repositories of such pregnancy-related data. This article charts the history of women's pocketbooks providing printed affordances for menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Throughout the eighteenth century, women's printed pocketbooks were self-conscious of, and began to make more obvious, their potential to assist the safe delivery of children. The first mass-produced tool for predicting childbirth, Anton F.A. Desberger's Schwangerschaftskalender (1827), translated into English as the Marriage Almanack in 1835, presupposed a female readership familiar with women's pocketbooks' self-conscious capacity to assist family planning.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth... more This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century' explores the various types of literary and visual creativity enacted by medical practitioners as they sought new ways of communicating and engaging with the public. Focusing on the shift from Latin to vernacular publishing in elite medical circles, we examine the proliferation of new opportunities open to physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, medical artists, midwives, and other women practitioners to express themselves. Novels, drama, poetry, artworks, almanacs, and letters, to name but a few creative products of the period, allowed new ideas and underrepresented voices to be heard for the first time, changing forever the way creative and empirical cultures would intertwine. Stemming from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660-1832 (2018-22), this research has undoubtedly been impacted by the rapidly changing nature of public healthcare in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that was still ongoing when this issue went to print. We value and celebrate connections made between the past and present that continue to assist us in understanding and caring for our bodies.
Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period (London: Palgrave), 2022
Ann Fisher (1719–1778), author of bestselling grammatical textbooks, co-founded and co-edited wit... more Ann Fisher (1719–1778), author of bestselling grammatical textbooks, co-founded and co-edited with her husband, Thomas Slack, the Newcastle Chronicle. Though she worked alongside him, and sometimes independently, in their Newcastle print shops, Fisher’s work as a printer-publisher remains underexplored. This chapter demonstrates her role in printing and publishing John Cunningham’s Poems, Chiefly Pastoral (1766 and 1772) and her own Ladies’ Own Memorandum-Book (1764–1778), unique in being the only women’s pocket book produced by a woman in this period. Drawing upon manuscript archives of correspondence in the British Library, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, and the National Library of Scotland, this chapter provides a rare insight into the professional practice of a female printer and publisher within a family business.
How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays, ed. by Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger, Methuen Drama (London: Bloomsbury), 2020
British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters, ed. by Mascha Hansen and Sebastien Domsch (London: Palgrave), 2021
From the 1770s onwards gravesites of characters from Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Trist... more From the 1770s onwards gravesites of characters from Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1791) appeared across Germany and in America. This essay traces the emergence of these graves as a unique form of literary afterlife, suggesting that they were a means by which readers could express the heightened sensibility characteristic of the sentimental novel tradition through communing with favourite dead characters and – whether through sociable pilgrimage or simply in imagination – other sentimental readers. Considering the characteristically tragic outcomes for female protagonists of the sentimental novel, the practice of grave-visiting depends on whilst also unpacking narratives which frame female sexuality, other than that which conveniently concludes with marriage, as tragedy. Graves to fictional characters therefore facilitated readers' quixotic mourning whilst holding the potential to provoke collective criticism of sentimental literary culture's framing of female sexuality without marriage as causing only social ostracism, suffering and death.
The Shandean, 2020
This essay argues that Sterne’s satire in A Political Romance pokes fun not just at the disagreem... more This essay argues that Sterne’s satire in A Political Romance pokes fun not just at the disagreement between lawyer Francis Topham and Dean of York John Fountayne, as is well known by Sterne scholars, but also at the role of a convivial club in that disagreement. Through analysing an early manuscript minute book of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s club previously unknown to scholars, the Good Humour Club of York (c.1724-1800), it will be demonstrated that nine of the club’s ninety-nine identified members were known to Sterne and that four of those were central to the pamphlet wars which climaxed with Sterne’s Political Romance in 1759. Sterne’s self-reflexivity in the Romance, through which he deconstructs his own satirical project and creates the self-consciousness perceived by scholars as anticipating the humour of Tristram Shandy, can be seen as a response to, and a satire of, the Good Humour Club’s involvement in local ecclesiastical affairs.
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2019
Our essay documents some of the issues we faced as modern editors of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a ... more Our essay documents some of the issues we faced as modern editors of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49). We were conscious of the groundbreaking earlier editions of Peter Sabor and Peter Wagner, and also of the particular difficulties posed by editing a text that was both the author’s first literary work and one that he subsequently repudiated. Our edition argues for the continuity of this early text with some of the concerns that become evident in Cleland’s later life and writings. In particular, we explore some of the novel’s many references to the physical health of its characters, such as Fanny’s mild smallpox in childhood, Mr. Norbert’s “flimsy consumptive texture,” and Mr. Crofts’s aggressive sexual impotence. We see these facets of the novel as being consistent with Cleland’s regular concern, evident from his letters, for the health of his friends, and his authorship in 1761 of the Institutes of Health, which details how individual well-being could be promoted by exercise, hygiene, and a good diet.
This article draws on the expanding terrain of digital newspaper archives to explore early advert... more This article draws on the expanding terrain of digital newspaper archives to explore early advertisements for Sterne's work. It situates its findings in relation to previous bibliographical studies to present a more contextual approach to how Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey were advertised during the 1760s. Comparing these small promotional texts with others produced for contemporaneous publications, and placing them within the broader context of publishing conventions in this period, this article shows that typical accounts of Sterne's 'originality' as found in his first reviews and in subsequent critical works was not always reflected in the often conventional nature of the advertisements of his novels. However, the authors conclude, perhaps these pared-back advertisements demonstrate all the more effectively the notorious celebrity both Sterne and his books had attained in the period of their first appearance.
Commemorating the death of Parson Yorick, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) ... more Commemorating the death of Parson Yorick, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy (1759) is often perceived as the preeminent symbol of his experimentation. But Sterne’s device may be less innovative than previously supposed, descending instead from two distinct traditions of depicting death in print: funeral literature and the typographic epitaph in the mid-century novel. In tracing inventive examples of memento mori iconography and identifying a profusion of novelistic epitaphs appearing during the 1740s and 1750s, this article situates the black page and Yorick’s epitaph in Sterne’s immediate literary context. In so doing, it demonstrates that his innovation in commemorating Yorick’s death lies in his deployment of a typesetting trend in the mid-century novel while simultaneously referencing a longstanding tradition of funeral publications. Through the mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph and the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, Sterne engages with the clichés of mourning iconography while playing on—and pushing to its limits—the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.
Notes & Queries, Sep 1, 2014
This article reveals two unknown letters by author John Cleland to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd ... more This article reveals two unknown letters by author John Cleland to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of
Rockingham. In this correspondence, Cleland deplores his want of patronage in his usual ungrateful and offensive manner whilst flattering himself that he might be an English Montesquieu, equally talented and similarly neglected by the powerful.
Review of English Studies, Mar 15, 2013
This article explores the relation between the eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland and the D... more This article explores the relation between the eighteenth-century novelist John Cleland and the Delaval family, occupants of Seaton Delaval Hall in north-east England. Cleland remains one of the most elusive literary figures in the eighteenth century, with paradoxically less being known about his life after he acquired fame (and notoriety) than before. Previous scholarship has surmised that his later years were spent in an embittered isolation from the world. Drawing on nine letters contained in the Delaval papers in Northumberland Archives, and also on financial accounts relating to John Hussey Delaval, we demonstrate the close link between Cleland and three different members of the Delaval family. This association provided a significant source of support for Cleland over the final four decades of his life, and the family emerge in our account as the only figures who could plausibly be described as his patrons. We also point to ways in which the Delaval letters shed light on Cleland’s journalistic career and on the nature of literary patronage in general during the later eighteenth century.
Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 2012
This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of h... more This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of his literary work through images of the hand and handwriting. It explores his experimentation with the typographic manicule and his innovation in representing script in print. I suggest that Sterne represents the hand and handwriting as ambiguous markers of authenticity in order to illustrate and lament the complexities of assigning literary property in this period.
The Publishing Lab, Jun 2013
Notes & Queries, Jan 6, 2013
Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings ... more Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings of his work based on meticulous examination of its material and bibliographical conditions. Alongside multiple editions and manuscripts of Sterne's own letters and works, a panorama of interdisciplinary sources are explored, including dance manuals, letter-writing handbooks, newspaper advertisements, medical pamphlets and disposable packaging. For the first time, this wealth of previously overlooked material is critically analysed in relation to the design history of Tristram Shandy, conceptualising the eighteenth-century novel as an artefact that developed in close conjunction with other media. In examining the complex interrelation between a period's literature and the print matter of everyday life, this study sheds new light on Sterne and eighteenth-century literature by re-defining the origins of his work and of the eighteenth-century novel more broadly, whilst introducing readers to diverse print cultural forms and their production histories.
John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in Eng... more John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors’ prison, and the book’s manifestly lewd content led to its legal suppression within a year of publication. Though versions of the novel, nearly always abridged in some form, continued to find a way into print, the Memoirs remained an underground text until the 1960s. Only as that decade ushered in a culture less socially deferential and more sexually permissive was the moment opportune for the obscenity ban to be successfully challenged. Cleland’s novel is a triumph of literary style, resting on his invention of an entirely new, vividly metaphoric, terminology for describing sexual pleasure.
This Broadview Edition provides extensive materials on Cleland’s biography and career, contemporary censorship, and pornography and prostitution in the eighteenth century.
Illustrated by Martin Rowson