The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

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 arousal, Castle explores what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination--