title: Wieland's nude bathers: visual pleasure and the female gaze.
abstract: In her essays on Wieland, written around 1980, Elizabeth Boa went against contemporary fashion both by praising a neglected writer and by vindicating the role of pleasure in the reception of literature. She noted how Wieland varies a literary topos – a man watching a woman bathing naked – by letting women watch men bathing naked. This topos most often occurs in the pastoral, a popular eighteenth-century genre. Various examples are examined to show that they suggest equality rather than male dominance in relations between the sexes: men watching women bathing in James Thomson and Gottfried Keller; an example involving cross-dressing in Kleist; and finally women watching men bathing naked in Swift, Voltaire and Wieland's Idris und Zenide.
authors.affiliation: Queen's College, University of Oxford.
authors.forename: Ritchie
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Robertson
mesh_terms: D001494:Baths / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018594:Human Body; D007398:Interpersonal Relations / Q000266:history; D008091:Literature / Q000266:history; D009715:Nudism / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D057181:Pleasure; D012928:Social Desirability; D014930:Women / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D016387:Women's Health / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history