Lieve wellust! Erotica in de achttiende eeuw

Dutch eighteenth-century erotic literature has so far not been the object of extensive study, this in stark contrast to contemporary erotic literature in other countries. Although nowadays nobody contests the idea that novels concerning physical love were widely pub-lished in the eighteenth-century, the focus has never been on the contemporary (literary) cri-tique. Rather than to compare eighteenth-century Dutch erotic literature to its French and English relatives, one should try to register what was being written about physical love in the Republic in order to understand how it functioned in Dutch novels. Text editions, bib-liographies and surveys regarding the topic could prove to be useful instruments in deter-mining the role erotic novels played in the eighteenth-century literary and moral discourse.