Eliza Haywood's Amatory Aesthetic

This essay finds an affiliation between Haywood's use of erotic subject matter and the reigning principle of early eighteenth-century literary culture—namely, to instruct and delight readers simultaneously. Consistent with emergent theories of the aesthetic that idealize the edification of polite subjects through intense transports of their imagination, Haywood's amatory fiction demonstrates that readers are at their most educable when their bodies are poised at the cusp of sensual abandon. It is in this posture of dual excitement of the body and mind, her work suggests, that readers are most susceptible to instruction in the realms of sex and society.