Lessing Society: Calls for Papers

Call for Papers: Lessing Yearbook / Jahrbuch 2017

Lessing, the European Enlightenment, and the First Sexual Revolution

Scholarship has long been aware that Lessing's texts, like those by many of his eighteenth-century European colleagues, mirror profound changes in gender roles and in the ways women and men interact in society. But it has paid less attention to the phenomenon that throughout the Enlightenment a discourse existed that examined the role of what later would be called "sexuality" in interhuman relations and that anticipated later trends by advocating a liberation of sexuality in its many different forms - for this reason the scholar Faramerz Dabhoiwala refers to the eighteenth century as the age of the "first sexual revolution" (see The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution [Oxford UP, 2012]). As part of a new philosophy of nature that rethinks society's norms and values, eighteenth-century authors argue for freeing sexual behavior from old restraints and prohibitions. Although liberating in their rethinking of the role of sexuality in society, such new ways of thinking were also a source of concern, as Dabhoiwala shows. While in the early eighteenth century female sexuality was the main focus of attention, later in the century male sexuality was increasingly problematized and the male libertine and sexual predator became a prominent figure in literature. European societies attempted to regulate sexuality by linking it to population growth, and through initiatives meant to reform sexual behavior (prostitution) in ways that are productive for society. Non-European societies provided models that conceive of sexuality outside of a monogamous relation, a phenomenon that fascinates eighteenth-century authors and anthropologists. While polygamy and homosexuality were far from central to Enlightenment thinking about sexuality, both were nevertheless occasionally discussed in eighteenth-century texts. Finally, by increasing literacy and making books and newspapers more easily accessible, the eighteenth century witnesses new forms of sexual celebrity: men and women willing to share their sexual biographies with the public through modern media.
The Lessing Yearbook invites essays in English or German that examine texts by Lessing and his contemporaries as exemplary for the rethinking of sexuality that characterized the eighteenth-century's "first sexual revolution." We are in particular interested in papers that situate texts by Lessing and his contemporaries in their European contexts. Please send a 300-word abstract by 25 June 2016 to niekerk@illinois.edu. Prospective contributors will be notified by 10 July 2016. Final papers (8,000 words) will be due 1 December 2016.