The question of an erotic readership has always vexed scholars. With little evidence of anyone's actually reading erotic material, scholars have made due with variations of an “ideal reader” approach. Insofar as it presupposes authorial intention and a stable meaning this theoretical model proves unsatisfactory. Using an interdisciplinary approach, “Carnal Reading” proposes a new theory of erotic reading that refigures bodily responses as constitutive of cognitive understanding. By “bodily responses” I do not merely indicate one-handed reading, but those responses derived from the corporeal emotions known to eighteenth-century commentators as the passions. In its content and style, erotic writing was perceived to interact physically with the reader's body, more specifically, the sensitive soul via the imagination. “Lively” descriptions infused desires that could permanently affect not only the entire “animal economy,” or constitution, but also a person's reasoning faculties. We shall discover that all good writing was meant to move the passions, but that there was no way to determine whether the “warmth” derived from reading was erotic or otherwise.

In chapter 1, “‘Thoughts Swelled with Carnosity’: Imagination, Enthusiasm, and Love,” I briefly rehearse Adrian John's account of how religious reading could inspire enthusiasm in readers. This understanding of how religious reading inflames the imagination applies equally well, I argue, to amorous discourses. In “The Passions: Music, ‘Infusion,’ and Teen-Age Reading Habits” (ch. 2), I examine early modern conduct books and discourses about music to illustrate the notion of the early modern body as “permeable,” and, as such, impressionable to all forms of stimulating media. I offer a close reading of Manley's New Atalantis to demonstrate how reading habits could transform a young person's constitution. In “The Physiological Aesthetics of Erotic Response: Intention, Style, Association” (ch. 3), I focus on contemporary literary critiques that privilege “lively” depictions, and the consequences that style has on authorial intention. My last chapter, “Sexy Rhetoric: Nice Figures, or Books that Do it ‘the old Grammar rule way,’” explores the potential eroticism immanent in language. The overall picture is of a reading body continually at odds with its susceptibility to language.