We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter maps the literary terrain that Defoe’s novels entered into and considers his position in literary history as the so-called father of the English novel. While Defoe would come to be associated with the emergence of a new style of realist fiction, he draws on, combines, and exploits the audience for popular generic forms, including romances, travel and adventure tales, romans à clef, pirate chronicles, jest books, collections of anecdotes, and criminal biographies. Extending his non-fictional work, Defoe experimented with narrative strategies to capture everyday experience – an artistic aim we now associate with various forms of realism. Provocative from the start, Defoe’s novels earned detractors and defenders but were recognized as central to the English canon as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter traces Defoe’s significance to the work of both practitioners and scholars of the novel form, including Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee.
Female-female eroticism had no formal space in the dominant premodern discourse on sex, which posited the phallus as indispensable to a woman's social and sexual fulfillment. For this reason, inevitably this chapter largely focuses on male, rather than female homoeroticism. The chapter provides a review of some of the earliest Chinese sources on male-male relations, especially because they gave rise to a classic lexicon of homosexuality. The expressions "longyang", "shared peach", and "cut sleeve" are the most prominent of such lexicon, and are still used. Some pornographic narratives from the second half of the seventeenth century indeed feature a new type of libertine, who can be sexually penetrated without his masculine credentials being compromised. The homosexual initiation takes the form of a rape, with the husband taking advantage of the libertine young scholar's intoxicated state. A discursive orientation more critical of homoeroticism can certainly be detected in eighteenth-century fiction.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.