Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature Chernaik Hardback 9780521464970

Sexual Freedom in Restoration LiteratureAuthor(s): Warren Chernaik\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521464970, 978-0521464970\nSynopsis\nThe pursuit of sexual freedom and its political, philosophical and practical implications are the themes of this wide-ranging study of restoration literature, which confronts ideological issues of sexual politics equally relevant to modern debate. The author examines the writers of the later seventeenth century in their historical context, and focuses particularly on what happens when women desire sexual freedom as well as men. In a study of the writings, notorious for their sexual candour, of the Earl of Rochester, God-haunted atheist and licensed rebel of the Restoration court, and Aphra Behn, the most prominent and most controversial woman writer of the period, the author explores some of the tensions inherent in the ideology of individual liberty as applie.