Reviews
An impressively learned, scrupulously detailed study.
Cleland's life story is a puzzle with many pieces still missing. But Gladfelder's careful, painstaking reconstructions have brought the fascinating picture into much clearer focus.
Anyone interested in the history of pornography or Cleland cannot afford to be without this study of the writer and his work.
Lucid and engaging.
Fanny Hill in Bombay will prove to be of essential reading to scholars of many kinds: of the novel; print culture; social; legal and colonial history; and translation.
Intelligently conceived, intensely researched, gracefully articulated, Mr. Gladfelder's Fanny Hill in Bombay has 'made'... the 'literary career' of Cleland as a perversely exemplary 'miscellaneous writer' on the cusp of modernity.
Innovative, adventurous, and exciting. Gladfelder has given us a new and, for eighteenth-century studies, a newly significant and central John Cleland—a writer whose notoriety as author of the first pornographic novel in English has until now overshadowed a long, varied, and remarkable career as colonial administrator, projector, jailbird, bookseller's hack, alleged sodomite, translator, reviewer, philologist, and author of numerous original works beyond the Memoirs. All this arises from an exemplary—an unusual and immensely enabling—combination of painstaking archival and other historical research and analytic, expository flair. The scholarship is formidable throughout.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
John Cleland: A Chronology
1. Fanny Hill in Bombay (1728–1740)
2. Down and Out in Lisbon and London (1741–1748)
3. Sodomites (1748–1749)
4. Three Memoirs (1748–1752)
5. The Hack (1749–1759)
6
Acknowledgments
John Cleland: A Chronology
1. Fanny Hill in Bombay (1728–1740)
2. Down and Out in Lisbon and London (1741–1748)
3. Sodomites (1748–1749)
4. Three Memoirs (1748–1752)
5. The Hack (1749–1759)
6. The Man of Feeling (1752–1768)
7. A Briton (1757–1787)
Epilogue: Afterlife
Appendix: Cleland's Mémoire to King João V of Portugal (1742)
Notes
Bibliography
Index