Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism

by Lutz, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780393068320
• ISBN10: 0393068323
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-02-14
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

In 1860s London, two loosely overlapping groups of bohemians-the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes-challenged the buttoned-up Victorian propriety to promote erotic freedom and expression. Sensually attuned and politically radical, they were among the most influential thinkers and artists of the day, from Richard Burton to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. These iconoclasts not only navigated the fringes of sexual deviance with their bodies but also carried the pleasures of the body into their work, creating a taboo-loving counterculture whose reverberations can be felt today. In this stunning and nuanced exposeacute; of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, showing us how their work uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women's emancipation, the dissolution of traditional religions, and the pressing need to expand accepted forms of sexual expression.

Table of Contents

Ackowledgments	p. 9
Introduction	p. 11
Pleasures Taken	p. 17
Erotic Melancholia	p. 19
Erotic Faith	p. 48
The Seductress and the Bluestocking	p. 84
Men Together	p. 115
The Grove of the Evangelist	p. 117
Cannibals and Other Lovers of Men	p. 144
Feasting with Panthers	p. 175
Collectors and Pornographers	p. 205
The Science of Sex	p. 207
Burton's Exotica	p. 234
Cabinets of Curiosity	p. 256
Postscript	p. 281
Notes	p. 285
Credits	p. 307
Index	p. 309
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