Desire : a history of European sexuality / Anna Clark.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clark, Anna

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex--Europe--History.

Sex.

Sex customs--Europe--History.

Sex customs.

Desire--Social aspects.

Desire.

History.

Europe.

Physical Description:

ix, 282 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York ; London : Routledge, 2008.

Summary:

Desire: A History of European Sexuality is a survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present. The book traces two concepts of sexual desire that have competed throughout European history: desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary. Following these changing attitudes through the major turning points of European history, Anna Clark concludes by demonstrating that western European sexual culture is quite distinct from many other cultures, and asks whether the vision of sexual desire as revolutionary, even transcendent, has faded in the modern secular era.

While Desire builds on the work of dozens of historians, it also takes a fresh approach. Explaining how authorities tried to manage sexual desire and sometimes failed, the book introduces the concept of 'twilight moments' to describe activities seen as shameful or dishonourable, but which were tolerated when concealed by shadows. Other topics addressed include: Sex in Greece and Rome, Divine desire in Judaism and early Christianity, New attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Victorian twilights.

Written in a lively and engaging style, this new survey contains many fascinating anecdotes, and draws on a rich array of sources including poetry, novels, pornography and film as well as court records, autobiographies and personal letters. Desire integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, focuses on the emotions of love as well as the passions of lust, and explores the politics of sex as well as personal experiences.

Contents:

Introduction : sex and the problem of Western civilization

Sex and the city : Greece and Rome

Divine desire in Judaism and early Christianity

Medieval fantasies of desire, sacred and profane

From twilight moments to moral panics : the regulation of sex from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century

The age of exploration : sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica

Enlightening desire : new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

In the Victorian twilight : sex out-of-wedlock, sexual commerce, and same-sex desire, 1750-1870

Boundaries of the nation, boundaries of the self : 1860-1914

Managing desire or consuming sex in interwar culture

Sex and the state in the 1930s : Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany

The reconstruction of desire and sexual consumerism in postwar Europe.

Notes:

Errata inserted.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415775175

9780415775182

0415775175

0415775183

OCLC:

191865960

Online:

Publisher description