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

The work of leading scholar Terry Castle features essays on phantasmagoria in 18th-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer", an imaginary instrument invented by 18th-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores the ways in which the rationalist imperative of the age paradoxically worked to produce the "impinging strangeness" of the 18th-century imagination.