more extensive and unaffected pleasure

[lotesse]

Why, when discussing eighteenth-nineteenth(twentieth-)century anti-novel rhetoric, does no one address the discursive parallels with injunctions against onanism/masturbation? (and does anyone know of a book that does? because I would totally read that book.)

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

olitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722

As a medievalist I dispute this assertion!

[ithiliana]

As someone who lives with a medieval historian, I know that a whole slew of people in academia tend to think that everything starts in the "early modern period" and know sod all about the Middle Ages. I don't know Laqueur's training, but I do know the book has had a lot of critical criticism (I keep telling myself I should read it, I just never get around to it--am much more drawn by the other book I mentioned above)

[oursin]

That is certainly a very weird blurb, since what happens with Onania-mania is that what used to be a sin becomes a medically-dangerous practice. It also gets a different publication date for The Big O than the book itself, which places it about a decade earlier as I recall!