- Title
- Impolite reading and erotic interiors in eighteenth-century France
- Creator
- Downey, Georgina; Taylor, Mark
- Relation
- Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media p. 13-28
- Relation
- http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/designing-the-french-interior-9780857857798
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- The eighteenth century in France is close enough in tin1e for us to appreciate its exultation of the senses and its single-minded pursuit of pleasure. Yet, it is also far enough away to forget that these pleasures were largely imagined through text and image, as part of the program of libertine and materialist philosophies of the period. Toward the end of the century, the literacy rate across the general population rose and might have been anywhere between 40 percent and 93 percent, depending on the area (Schama 1989: 180), and erotica could thus be read by all but the poorest. Yet, while Enlightenment reading cultures were driving production and sale of perfectly legal material, the most explicit examples, what Robert Darnton has called "impolite" readings, still attracted the condemnation of the authorities of Church and State. In France as in other Catholic cultures, sin was considered as wicked in thought and word as in deed, and punishments and fines were common. So, whether participating in the politics of libertinage or simply telling a bawdy tale, erotic images and texts were produced and consumed at a cost. Nevertheless, "the jouissance to be found in words" was most explicitly recognized by fashionable and influential writers, readers, and viewers of this period with writer-adventurers such as Giacomo Casanova, John Cleland, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos being perhaps the best known exemplars (Albano 2007: 140). Further, this "impolite" reading had a specific set of interesting effects on the development of the modern French interior, demanding that it be more immersive and more psychologically co-optive than in the previous century.
- Subject
- erotica; France; interior design; modern interior
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1313238
- Identifier
- uon:22543
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780857857835
- Language
- eng
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