ABSTRACT
Sarah Schäfer-Althaus explores the woman-as-land metaphor in Thomas Stretzer's A New Description of Merryland (1741), an eighteenth-century somatopic erotica curiosa. Directed at the members of the Royal Society, and thus at a European, male, upper-class, and lettered audience, Merryland mirrors contemporary Grand Tour ideology whose goal was to round off male elite education with instruction and delight. As such, the erotic pamphlet centers on a scientist-traveler's journey of territorial expansion to, on, and in(to) the female body (‘Merryland’), presented as a topographical body-place in need of mapping, exploration, systematization, and closer examination. Profoundly allegorical, Merryland makes use of contemporary literary trends to address a kaleidoscope of the century's political, cultural, social, scientific, and gendered concerns and offers a highly gendered portrayal of the corporality of traveling and of bodies in motion. With its fluid oscillation of geographical, botanical, agricultural, colonial, and scientific imagery, ideas, and nomenclatures, Merryland, as Schäfer-Althaus argues, provides compelling insights into the multivalent and changing discourses on anatomy, sexuality, reproduction, and gender ideology emerging in the eighteenth century.
