Wieland And The Phallic Breast

In recent years the cultural history of the female breast has become a focus of attention. Scholars of the eighteenth century have explored the construction of motherhood and the anti‐wet‐nursing debates that followed the European reception of Rousseau’s Émile . The present article proceeds under the assumption that powerful cultural fantasies relating to the breast are at work in the late eighteenth century. By investigating the works of one of the more breast‐obsessed writers of the Rococo and Classical periods, Christoph Martin Wieland, the article shows both Wieland’s rhetorical efforts to materialise the breast in the text for his readers and the unexpected propensity of the breast to attain threatening or phallic proportions. The article pays particular attention to Wieland’s Musarion , Agathon , and ‘Gedanken über die Ideale der Alten’

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Phallic stage · Psychoanalysis · Rhetorical question · Sociology · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Libraries and Information Services · Psychology