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

[oursin]

Be aware that a lot of what Laqueur presents as his own discovery has been well-known for decades - for heaven's sake, Havelock Ellis pointed out the Onania thing in the 1900s and there has been much subsequent historiography.

He also manages to leave out the entire Victorian era, and I have a lot of other problems with that book, but will leave there as I have to go to work.

[oursin]

I was pretty sure that the late, great Roy Porter had written on the subject, but given how prolific he was, not precisely where. I have ascertained that there is a chapter on enlightenment masturbation phobia in The Facts of Life which may give refs to articles etc; plus, he may well have revisited in his work on the English enlightenment.