French Dressing

French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction—unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display—French undressing.

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, also published by Routledge.