Robert A. Nye – författare

Sexuality has always been an obsessive human concern; it has often been the real subject of cultural, religious, and political discourses that did not dare to mention it or did not have the language for addressing it directly. We now possess both the language and the cultural temerity to discuss sexuality as straightforwardly as we like, and with a frankness that would have shocked people a few decades ago. It now seems impossible to contemplate human happiness without some measure of sexual fulfilment, although that remains a notoriously elusive and negotiable ideal. Nor is it possible now to think about our identities or the identities of others without factoring in sexual tastes and orientation. The central message of this book is that we are unlikely to understand the promise or the limits of our contemporary sexualities unless we understand those of the past. Robert A. Nye's Oxford Reader is intended to be used on the wide ranges of undergraduate courses which address issues of human sexuality: courses taught in departments of history, women's studies, medical history, sociology, gay and lesbian studies, anthropology, religion, and literary studies, as well as in professional programmes such as medicine, public health, clinical psychology, social work, and law. Part I of the Reader forms a chronological narrative of the development of thinking about sexuality from the ancient Greeks to the present. Part II discusses nineteenth-century investigation of phenomena such as hysteria, prostitution, fetishism, and exhibitionism. Part III brings together contemporary conceptions of the sexual body, and Part IV addresses the issue of whether the sexual revolution of the late sixties and seventies has brought about a profound and permanent change in the sexual landscape of western civilization.

After a decade of works on women's history, historians are becoming aware of the dearth of literature on men's history. Professor Nye addresses this gap in a study of evolving definitions of masculinity in France since the eighteenth century. He examines specifically the aristocratic ethos of male honour, rooted in a society of landlords, hunters, and warriors, adapted to a society motivated by utilitarian values, urban life, and rational law. He focuses on the cultural practices and mentality of middle and upper class men and the appeal of their codes to men throughout French society.

In this study of upper-class masculinity from the end of the ancien regime in 1789 to the end of World War I, Robert Nye argues that manhood, masculinity, and male sexuality is, like femininity, a cultural construct, comprising a strict set of heroic ideals and codes of honor which few men have been able to realize in practice. In doing so, Nye destabilizes and historicizes the male body, and incorporates gender into the brand of cultural history inaugurated by Norbert Elias in the 1930s.

Robert A. Nye places in historical context a medical concept of deviance that developed in France in the last half of the nineteenth century, when medical models of cultural crisis linked thinking about crime, mental illness, prostitution, alcoholism, suicide, and other pathologies to French national decline. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.