James Grantham Turner, Professor

Phone: 510-642-2749

Areas of Interest

Renaissance, Restoration & 18th-Century British Literature (1600-1780, and its European context. Renaissance Art and the Classical Inheritance. Gender & Sexuality in Literature and Art (1500-1800). Narrative & the Novel. Biblical exegesis, Puritanism. John Milton and John Bunyan.

Current Research

A new multi-disciplinary history of sexuality post Foucault, exploring European literature (Classical through 18th century), social history, and visual culture

Professional Statement

B.A. (1968), Cert.Ed., M.A., D.Phil. (1977) from Oxford University; taught at six British and US universities (Oxford, Sussex, Liverpool, Virginia, Northwestern, Michigan) before coming to Berkeley as Professor in 1990; currently holds the James D. Hart Chair. Fellowships include Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS. 100-plus publications large and small since 1972. Invited lectures include keynote address to the Milton Society of America (1994) and the Charles Mills Gayley Lecture in this department (2001). Has served on the advisory board of PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Restoration, and contributed to the exhibition "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" opening November 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, essays (edited) with an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, essays coedited with David Loewenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Awarded the James Holly Hanford Award, 1988; Clarendon Paperback Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, l630-l660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, l979). Awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize, l979

"The Visual Realism of Comenius," History of Education I (l972), pp. ll3-38

"The Structure of Henry Hoare's Stourhead," Art Bulletin LXI (l979), pp. 68-77

"Bunyan's Sense of Place," in V.E. Newey, ed., The Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, l980), pp. 9l-ll0

"The Sexual Politics of Landscape: Images of Venus in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry and Landscape Gardening," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture XI (l982), pp. 343-64

"The Properties of Libertinism," Eighteenth Century Life IX, n.s. 3 (May 1985), pp. 75-87; reissued in Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed., 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

"Pope's Libertine Self-fashioning," in David B. Morris, ed., Special Issue on Alexander Pope, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation XXIX (1988), pp. 123-44

"Lovelace and the Paradoxes of Libertinism," in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, eds., Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 70-88

Introduction to Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), World's Classics edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

"Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson's Pamela," Representations XLVIII (Fall, 1994), pp. 60-84

"Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy," in Gerald MacLean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 95-110

"`News from the New Exchange': Commodity, Erotic Fantasy, and the Female Entrepreneur," in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 419-39

"From Revolution to Restoration in English Literary Culture," in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 790-833

"`A Wanton Kind of Chase': Display as Procurement in A Harlot's Progress and its Reception," in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds., The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 38-61. Book awarded the 2002-2003 Historians of British Art Prize for "best multi-authored/edited volume treating a topic on British visual culture from any period"

"Marcantonio's Lost Modi and their Copies," Print Quarterly XXI (2004), pp. 364-84

"The Erotics of the Novel," in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula A. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 214-34

"Libertine Literature Forty Years On: I, From Aretino to The School of Venus," The Book Collector LIV (2005), pp. 29-51

"Libertine Literature Forty Years On: II, Nicolas Chorier and His Emulators," The Book Collector LIV (2005), pp. 231-56

"Milton among the Libertines," in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds, Milton, Rights and Liberties (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 447-60

"Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno and Aretino," in Elizabeth Sauer and Sharon Achinstein, eds, Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 107-25

"Caraglio's Loves of the Gods," Print Quarterly XXIV (2007), pp. 359-80

"I Modi and Aretino: The `Toscanini Volume' Reconsidered," The Book Collector LVI (2008), forthcoming

"Profane Love: The Challenge of Sexuality," in Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exhibition catalog (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), pp. 178-84

"Copies after Caraglio's Loves of the Gods," Print Quarterly XXV (2008), forthcoming

Office Hours

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