A want of manly vigor: Impotence and authorial identity in eighteenth-century narrative

As literary historians have noted, writers in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England were seemingly obsessed with male sexual impotence. Contemporary stage comedy, verse, prose fiction, bawdy tales, medical texts, sexual advice manuals, legal proceedings, and political lampoons reflect a persistent and pervasive concern with the "Decay of that true old English Vigour." Although most scholarly assessments of this phenomenon suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that the national fascination with impotence subsided after the Restoration, the central premise of this dissertation is that it did not abate at the turn of the century so much as it expressed itself in new, more complex ways.;Specifically, I examine the distinctive way in which the eighteenth century's manifest concerns with male sexual dysfunction intersect with broader concerns about male narrative authority. I focus on a strange, recurrent phenomenon in works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and James Boswell: male narrators of fictional and nonfictional personal histories who repeatedly---and perplexingly---announce their own sexual inadequacies. That they do so in texts that are centrally concerned with male literary authority, as well as deeply invested in conventional figurations of writing as a sexually generative act of male potency, makes the confessions of incapacity all the more intriguing. In considering what such admissions reveal about sexual and authorial power in these texts, I explore how the impotent author-narrators work to consolidate their masculine power even as they appear to relinquish it. Their admissions of incapacity work paradoxically and often covertly to bolster male literary authority, as the impotent narrator parlays his weakness into currency in the transaction between writer and reader. Such works thus challenge traditional assumptions about male sexual potency and literary authority: complicating simple equations of creative and phallic power, they substantially reconfigure the eroticized relationships among author, text, and audience.