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Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment » (1)

Book cover image of Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment by Elizabeth Susan Wahl

Authors: Elizabeth Susan Wahl
ISBN-13: 9780804729567, ISBN-10: 0804729565
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Date Published: September 1999
Edition: 1

Author Biography: Elizabeth Susan Wahl

Elizabeth S. Wahl is an independent scholar.

Book Synopsis

This book explores how representations of intimacy between women included both a sexualized model of the “lesbian” tribade and an “idealized” model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression.

Booknews

Explores the ambivalent and often contradictory ways that English and French writers of the 17th and 18th centuries represented relations of intimacy between women, both the sexualized lesbian model and the ideal friendship model. Analyzes a variety of legal, medical, and historical material as well as literary texts. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	Introduction	1
1	The Tribade, the Hermaphrodite, and Other "Lesbian" Figures in Medical and Legal Discourse	17
2	Representations of the Tribade in Libertine Literature	43
3	'L'Amour Galant' and 'Tendre Amitie': Love and Friendship Outside the Bonds of Marriage	75
4	Female Intimacy and the Question of "Lesbian" Identity: Rereading the Female Friendship Poems of Katherine Philips	130
5	Female Intimacy and the Problem of Female Communities: Salons, Satire, and the Mystery of the 'Precieuses'	173
6	Regulating the "Real" in Fictional Terms: The (Auto)biography of the Tribade in Erotic and Documentary Texts	212
	Notes	255
	Works Cited	329
	Index	351

Subjects

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