Pleasure Bound
Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
Published on 14. February 2011
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-0-393-06832-0 (ISBN)
Description
At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day.
As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies-the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes-to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet.
In this stunning expose of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women's emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.
As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies-the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes-to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet.
In this stunning expose of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women's emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression.
Reviews / Votes
"Pleasure Bound shines a sensitive light into the darker corners of Victorian sexuality. The sometimes subtle, sometimes consuming interplay of sensuality and death; the danger and draw of sexual transgression; the irresistible lure of forbidden pleasure--through their erotic longings and adventures, the Victorian sex rebels lead us to the heart of a struggle for authentic sexual expression in an era of repression now past. Or is it?" -- Patricia Anderson, Ph.D., author of When Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians "Pleasure Bound is a lively, readable and informative survey of the sometimes surprising connections between art, literature, and the sexual underworld in Victorian England." -- David Lodge, author of Deaf Sentence "As seductive as a Swinburne sapphic, Pleasure Bound is for the casual reader, the aesthete and the pleasure seeker alike. If there wasn't a scholarly excuse for reading it, you'd feel guilty for having so much fun. Just don't leave it lying around." -- Wesley Stace, author of Misfortune "Using a deft combination of biography, aesthetic analysis, and cultural commentary, Pleasure Bound offers a history of those Victorian writers and artists who lived-and sometimes died-for the conjoined cause of eros and art. The result is a bawdy, intricate, edifying, and sometimes heartbreaking book that sheds light on a fascinating constellation of creators, without ever losing sight of the importance of keeping-as Lutz sagely puts it -- 'the dark core dark.'" -- Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty "A delightful spree through Victorian England's red-light district, Deborah Lutz's Pleasure Bound explores in lucid and engaging prose the pornographic underpinnings of nineteenth-century British art, poetry, and anthropology." -- Matthew Kaiser, Harvard University "It is unusual to find a history of sex that is both readable and erudite. Deborah Lutz's Pleasure Bound is a delightful romp between the legs-and elsewhere-of Victorian England that offers a deeply penetrating gaze into its sexual subjects." -- Frederick S. Roden, author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture "A polished, thought-provoking, and original work of history that possesses all the finesse of literature." -- Simon Van Booy, author of The Secret Lives of People in LoveMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Rough front
Illustrations
8 pages four-color and 5 black-and-white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
520 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-393-06832-0 (9780393068320)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
02/2011
W. W. Norton & Company
€25.99
Available for download
Person
Deborah Lutz is the author of six books, including This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, A Life and The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at Pennsylvania State University as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions-Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.