Unauthorized Pleasures : : Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience / / Ellen Bayuk Rosenman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.) :; 20 halftones

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Seeking Pleasure in Victorian Britain -- 1. Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic -- 2. The Man on the Street: Gender, Vision, and the City -- 3. Spectacular Women: The Mysteries of London and Female Pleasure -- 4. Theresa Longworth and the Yelverton Marriage Story: How to Write Your Own Romance -- 5. My Secret Life: The Consolation of Pornography -- Afterword: Pleasures Then and Now -- Works Cited -- Index -- About the Author