Description
Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual. She looks at instances of sapphism in such novels as Millenium Hall, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Belinda, and Emma and analyzes how the new literary form of the novel made the bourgeois heroine's successful negotiation of female friendship central to the establishment of her virtue. Moore also examines representations of sapphism through the sweeping economic and political changes of the period and claims that middle-class readers' identifications with the heroine's virtue helped the novel's bourgeois audience justify the violent bases of their new prosperity, including slavery, colonialism, and bloody national rivalry.
In revealing the struggle over sapphism at the heart of these novels of female friendship-and at the heart of England's national identity-Moore shows how feminine sexual agency emerged as an important cultural force in post-Enlightenment England
About the Author
Lisa L. Moore is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Reviews
"Engaging and original . . . Dangerous Intimacies makes a singular contribution to lesbian studies, feminist studies, and the history of the novel."-Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Boston College
"Moore refers to some of the most important current debates in queer theory-the nature of sexual identity, its history, its roots, and its relation to other factors in identity formations, such as race, class, ethnicity, gender, and national origin. She locates those arguments in persuasive, insightful readings that are refreshingly unhackneyed."-Sally O'Driscoll, Fairfield University
Book Information
ISBN 9780822320494
Author Lisa L. Moore
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 413g