Background
Castle, Terry Jacqueline was born on October 18, 1953 in San Diego, California, United States. Daughter of Richard P. Castle and Mavis K. (Goodhead) Parker.
(The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the N...)
The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times "always engaging...consistently fascinating," has helped to revolutionize eighteenth-century studies. The Female Thermometer brings together Castle's essays on the phantasmagoric side of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer," an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination--the ways in which the rationalist imperatives of the age paradoxically worked to produce what Freud would later call the uncanny. In essays on doubling and fantasy in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, sexual impersonators and the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science, and the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic fiction, Castle offers a haunting portrait of a remarkable epoch. Her collection explores the links between material culture, gender, and the rise of modern forms and formulas of subjectivity, effectively rewriting the cultural history of modern Europe from a materialist and feminist perspective.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019508098X/?tag=2022091-20
( Public masquerades were a popular and controversial for...)
Public masquerades were a popular and controversial form of urban entertainment in England for most of the eighteenth century. They were held regularly in London and attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from all ranks of society who delighted in disguising themselves in fanciful costumes and masks and moving through crowds of strangers. The authors shows how the masquerade played a subversive role in the eighteenth-century imagination, and that it was persistently associated with the crossing of class and sexual boundaries, sexual freedom, the overthrow of decorum, and urban corruption. Authorities clearly saw it as a profound challenge to social order and persistently sought to suppress it. The book is in two parts. In the first, the author recreates the historical phenomenon of the English masquerade: the makeup of the crowds, the symbolic language of costume, and the various codes of verbal exchange, gesture, and sexual behavior. The second part analyzes contemporary literary representations of the masquerade, using novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, and Inchbald to show how the masquerade in fiction reflected the disruptive power it had in contemporary life. It also served as an indispensable plot-catalyst, generating the complications out of which the essential drama of the fiction emerged. An epilogue discusses the use of the masquerade as a literary device after the eighteenth century. The book contains some 40 illustrations.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804714681/?tag=2022091-20
( In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe a...)
In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231076533/?tag=2022091-20
literary scholar Lambda Literary Editor
Castle, Terry Jacqueline was born on October 18, 1953 in San Diego, California, United States. Daughter of Richard P. Castle and Mavis K. (Goodhead) Parker.
Bachelor in English, University Puget Sound, 1975. Master of Arts in English, University Minnesota, 1978. Doctor of Philosophy in English, University Minnesota, 1980.
She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe." Her essays appear regularly in the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, and the New Republic. The daughter of British parents, Castle was born in San Diego and lived in England and Southern California as a child. She attended the University of Puget Sound and graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
She went on to attend the University of Minnesota to get her Doctor of Philosophy in English.
A longtime resident of San Francisco, Castle is currently Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
( In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe a...)
(At the heart of this striking collection is the title wor...)
( Public masquerades were a popular and controversial for...)
(The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the N...)
(1)
Member Modern Language Association (William Riley Parker prize 1985), American Society 18th Century Studies (James Clifford prize 1988).