The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England

Hardcover and dust jacket. Minor tears to dust jacket. Good binding and cover. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages. x, 253 p., 22 cm. "The rake achieved dramatic prominence, according to Weber, only when sexual excess was no longer defined by a sexual demonic vocabulary that arose from sixteenth and early seventeenth century fascination with witchcraft. As legal prosecutions of witches declined and the language of demonic sexuality lost its privileged status, new sexual vocabularies developed. As portrayed in Restoration comedy and the eighteenth century novel, the rake gave expression to a multiplicity of new secular discourses for talking about sexuality and revealed a new understanding of how sexuality helps to generate the individual personality.".