English student Adrianna Eyking pens prize-winning essay 
 
Fourth-year honours English student Adrianna Eyking has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2009 North American Conference on British Studies Undergraduate Prize (NACBS), for her essay entitled “The Symptoms of Sweet Agony: The Hysteria of Female Sexual Experience" in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure.

The NACBS Undergraduate Essay Prize is awarded to the best essays in British Studies in a Canadian university course. Essays may be from any department – History, English, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, etc. – as long as the focus of the essay is in British Studies.

Ms. Eyking’s essay was written for English 254, taught by Dr. Earla Wilputte. Ms. Eyking wins a $100 U.S. prize.

In her essay, Ms. Eyking argues that a close reading of Fanny Hill reveals an underlying medical and scientific discourse echoing texts such as Dr. Robert James’s 1743 Medicinal Dictionary that diagnose female sexuality as abnormal or aberrant – symptomatically categorized as “hysterica.” Long considered a pornographic novel, Fanny Hill is “less about the reader’s sexual gratification and more about exploring the medicine of female sexuality and the hysteria of women’s unrestrained passion.”