Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (1748-1928)

Keynote speakers:

Helen Berry (Newcastle University) on Sex, Marriage and the Castrato
Joseph Bristow (UCLA) on Oscar Wilde's Sexual Practices
Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London) on Rape, Representation and Slavery
Richard C. Sha (American University) on Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Free Love

From the publication of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

(1928), literature has imaginatively exploited the relationship between freedom, coercion and sexual

pleasure, constantly pushing at the boundaries of what it is permissible to describe, represent and perform.

At the same time, the history of print, film and theatre censorship has been told as a story of progressive

unshackling from constraint. In this narrative, these ever-widening freedoms and challenges have been

understood as positively beneficial to individuals and to societies. Yet the idea of sexual liberty as an

unqualified good has increasingly come under scrutiny, giving way to the realization that freedom

from sexual constraint can sometimes mean imprisonment in new and alternate structures of power,

frustration and denial. This international, multidisciplinary conference seeks to complicate and enrich

our understanding of the relation between sex, pleasure and coercion in a liberal context. It will explore

the many ways in which literary and visual texts and performances can be understood to create, reinforce,

question and/or dissolve these structures, as well as interrogate the complicity of publishing and the law

in their framing and dismantling.

The conference is organised at Newcastle University by the Long Nineteenth Century Research Group