Men in Love ― Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighettnth Century

Love in all its cultural and personal complexity is the focus of this book. While scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century homoerotic culture have tended to focus on sexual behavior and the much-maligned figure of the sodomite, George E. Haggerty argues that the concepts of love and emotional intimacy offer a more useful perspective for understanding male-male relations of the time.

Haggerty considers male "identities" of many kinds: heroic friends, as found in seventeenth-century French romance and Restoration tragedy, and personal friends, as in the erotic relationships of Gray, Walpole, and West; fops and beaus, as depicted in Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedy and various satirical portraits; effeminate sodomites and mollies depicted in literature and sodomy trial accounts throughout the period; men of feeling and other figures in whom sensibility and sexuality are vividly interconnected. He also discusses libertines and sexual aggressors, especially as depicted in the pages of Gothic fiction.

George Haggerty is professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century and Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, co-editor (with Bonnie Zimmerman) of Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature, and editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Gay History and Cultures.