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Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme R tif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that R tif's 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten including how the author actively worked to define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre, and how he coined the psycho-sexual term "fetish" and played a central role in the formation of theories ...
Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) was perhaps the key author amongst a glut of imitators inspired by the publication of the Marquis de Sade’s “obscene” masterworks Juliette and Justine in the late 18th century. In 1798 Restif wrote his ultra-erotic epic The Anti-Justine (or The Joys of EroS), thus inaugurating a long tradition of “Sadean literature” that continues to this day. The Anti-Justine is a vivid and extreme novelization of Restif’s own life and sexual debauches, which the author tried to defend “morally” by declaring his book to be an “antidote” to the supposed poison of de Sade; yet whilst the book opens with a spurious warning to women against cruelty, it soon develops into a monumental odyssey of sexual depravity which often rivals de Sade in its relentless explicitness. This new edition of THE ANTI-JUSTINE has been freshly translated by Meredith Head (translator of de Sade’s Philosophy In The Boudoir), and contains an introductory essay by de Sade’s biographer Dr Iwan Bloch.
Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.
The Pornographer (Le Pornographe), written by Restif de la Bretonne and published in 1770 originally, is a novel, in epistolary format, that includes a serious proposal of rules for prostitution, at a state level, to address the problem of syphilis ravaging Europe at the time, as well as a counteractive to the degradation of public morality. To say that French author Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) was ahead of his time is, for anyone who knows his work, - and they are few - so platitudinous itʼs not funny. The man had an uncanny ability to synthesize history as far back as the Greeks, and that of his own pre-Napoleonic era, and to project it onto our present, his future, as easil...
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