The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660-1750

by Cameron McFarlane

Charting the emergence of the sodomite as a social type, this text argues that the sodomite symbolized a variety of economic and political conflicts and transgressions. The central question the text considers is: Why did so many 18th century writers represent the sodomite at all?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231108958
• ISBN13: 9780231108959
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Worthwhile addition to Eighteeenth-Century Studies

McFarlane's book is quite good on the topic it covers. It avoids essentializing or questing after gay identity in a politically-motivated way (although this too has led to worthwhile criticism), and remains skeptical and interested in the ways that the figure of the sodomite is constructed as a political and moral trope that captures many other "transgressions" beyond that it claims to name. Particularly relevant and enlightening are his readings of Smollet and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.