SOURCE: "Fanny Hill and Materialism," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 1970, pp. 21-40.

In the following essay, Braudy suggests that Cleland's Fanny Hill was influenced by the materialism that was part of the most advanced philosophic thought of Cleland's time.

… I felt every vessel in my frame dilate—The arteries beat all chearily together, and every power which sustained life performed it with so little friction, that 'twould have confounded the most physical precieuse in France: with all her materialism, she could scarce have called me a machine—

Laurence Sterne—Sentimental Journey

Fanny Hill presents an uncomfortable problem to both the theorist of pornography and the historian of literature; it has too broad a sense of social milieu and literary tradition for the writer interested in describing the "pure" elements of pomography as a literary genre, and it has too much erotic content for the literary historian to...