"Al crocevia tra natura e cultura. Mappe di acculturazione sociale e sessuale nel Settecento inglese"

From an interdisciplinary perspective, the paper focuses on the image of the crossroads between Nature and Culture in order to illustrate the complex process of negotiation between sexual and social roles that characterized the tense debate on modern, national acculturation in England in the course of the long eighteenth century. In particular, it aims to explore the tensions underlying the dominant patriarchal model for the successful socialization of the British ‘gentleman’ as equivocally staged in Laurence Sterne’s eccentric and hilariously knotty narrative of "Tristram Shandy". Indeed, the series of misfortunes that mark both the life and the writing of the novel’s garrulous protagonist betrays a deep anxiety concerning woman’s subversive potential by virtue of her reproductive capacity, thus bringing to the fore the contradictions inherent in the emerging disciplinary discourses on generation and gender. Secondly, the paper discusses those disturbing issues concerning the ‘pregnant moment’ in the field of visual arts, especially in that of family portraiture as an exemplary phenomenon of cultural and social formation, in the attempt to re-define the socially contentious arena of the public sphere and to recognize women’s role – so far much neglected - both in the production and consumption of the so-called ‘polite arts’.