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Erotic Gothic


Charlotte Dacre has been seen in her time and since as one of a group of women Romantic writers who made their subject the erotic. In Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane Austen’s Age, Ann H. Jones declares that ‘Charlotte Dacre’s style was always to be fevered and sexual relationships were to be of paramount importance in all she wrote’, and she cites Dacre’s contemporary Sarah Green’s inclusion of Dacre among ‘the most licentious writers of romance of the time’. Compared to erotic fiction today, Dacre’s The Libertine (4 vols, 1807) may not seem very sensual, since it never describes sexual activity directly and refers to it very obliquely. Like M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), The Libertine is ‘erotic’ in the sense that it represents desire, specifically in terms of sexual desire. The sexual here, however, as in The Monk and elsewhere in Romantic literature, is a figure for the passions and desire as generalised and paradoxical attributes of individual subjectivity, and a supposed part of human nature. The erotic is a paradoxical or ambiguous attribute of self because it has two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, it is the force impelling individual self-realisation across a diverse range of activity, from self-fashioning to imperial power, from artistic self-expression to capitalist accumulation, from commercialised consumption to participation in the fashion system, from acquisition of social status to career success, and even political power. On the other hand, as was demonstrated daily in contemporary history and current events, in scandal sheets and romans-à-clef, in newspaper lists of bankrupts, in accounts of the rise and fall of governments, and in biographies of Revolutionaries, the erotic could destroy not only oneself, but also family, party, nation and empire.

Volume Contents

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    Front Matter
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    Introduction By Gary Kelly
  • The Libertine (1807) By Charlotte Dacre
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      The Libertine; Vol. I
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        Chapter I
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        Chapter II
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        Chapter III
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        Chapter IV
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        Chapter V
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        Chapter VI
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        Chapter VII
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        Chapter VIII
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        Chapter IX
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        Chapter X
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      The Libertine; Vol. II
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        Chapter XI
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        Chap. XII
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        Chapter XIII
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        Chap. XIV
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        Chapter XV
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        Chapter XVI
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        Chapter XVII
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      The Libertine; Vol. III
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        Chapter XVIII
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        Chapter XIX
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        Chapter XX
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        Chapter XXI
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        Chapter XXII
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        Chapter XXIII: The nineteenth century in Great Britain
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        Chapter XXIV: The nineteenth century in Great Britain
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      The Libertine; Vol. IV
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        Chapter XXV
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        Chapter XXVI
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        Chapter XXVII
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        Chapter XXVIII
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        Chapter XXIX
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        Chapter XXX
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        Chapter XXXI
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    Back Matter