Overview

Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the ""spermatorrhea panic"" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects-homosexuals and prostitutes, for example-to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.

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9780801488566

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Reviews

Unauthorized Pleasures is engaging, at times fascinating. . . . As a resource for the authors who would like to paint a richer, more nuanced picture of Victorian sexuality, I would recommend this book, which packs a world of fascinating detail in its two hundred pages. -Lisabet Sarai, Erotica Readers and Writers Association

Author Information

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship and A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity.

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