Print Culture and the Commercialization of Sexuality, 1690-1750

Between the 1690s and the mid eighteenth century, a fully fledged popular print culture emerged in England, characterized by the emergence of a consumerist ideology and the burgeoning of commercial definitions of literary worth; the inflection of public and private spheres by print; the construction of new definitions of authorship, literary property, and reputation. Uniting theoretical and historical work in print culture/publishing history with that in the cultural construction of gender, this dissertation charts how these characteristics of print culture shaped the commercial exploitation of women as readers, writers, and subjects of discourse; and conversely, the impact of the "feminization" of letters and the novel on the discourses of authorship, reputation, and literary property. As print both constructed and blurred definitions of public and private, the commercialization of sexuality was juxtaposed with the representation of women as redemptive of consumerism. Chapter 1 contends that authorship, ownership, commercial worth, and the construction of public and private spheres are shaped equally by pint practices and by gender issues. Chapter 2 details the significance of John Dunton's championing of commerce and materiality, and how such values variously support or conflict with the emergent cultural construct of private female virtue grounded in a removal from the sexual implications of commerce. Chapter 3 argues that Samuel Richardson's Pamela rewrites the relation of Moll Flanders, aiming to elevate Pamela and its author by representing virtuous feminized writing as detached from trade and as circulating within the family. Chapter 4 elucidates Eliza Haywood's refusal of private writing as a site of pleasure and power for women, while she exploits the commercial attractions of women's love letters in her amatory fiction. By masking evidence of her later participation in the book trade, Haywood replicates Richardson's rhetorical separation of authorship from printing. Chapter 5 argues that Richardson's Clarissa represents itself as both a concession an an antidote to literary consumerism. In the novel and in his correspondence with women readers, Richardson reforms one form of corrupt consumer pleasure only to substitute the female body of sensibility and feminized letters as new forms of material pleasure.