Drawing on a wide range of evidence about 19th-century behaviour and opinion - from popular medicine to Malthusian polemic - this study argues that the present-day perception of 19th-century sexual culture misrepresents the true attitudes of Victorians.
What did the Victorians think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour? What wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the most persistent clichés of modern times. Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of evidence about 19th-century behaviour and opinion - from modern demographic analysis to the travel writing of foreign visitors, and from popular medicine to Malthusian polemic - Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of 19th-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a licence for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to be in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a human and progressive vision of society''s future. The "Average" Victorian man, for example, was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois pater familias of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. A lively and fascinating synthesis of a wealth of new research. The Making of Victorian Sexuality is a timely disruption of our present comfortable consensus on nineteenth-century society. Moreover, it persuasively argues that in Victorian sexual moralism there may be much to teach the complacently libertarian 20th century.
Get The Making of Victorian Sexuality by at the best price and quality guranteed only at Werezi Africa largest book ecommerce store. The book was published by Oxford University Press and it has pages. Enjoy Shopping Best Offers & Deals on books Online from Werezi - Receive at your doorstep - Fast Delivery - Secure mode of Payment
