Modernist eroticisms : European literature after sexology / edited by Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Schaffner, Anna Katharina.

Weller, Shane.

University of Kent. Centre for Modern European Literature.

Series:

Palgrave studies in modern European literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eroticism in literature.

Paraphilias in literature.

European literature--20th century--History and criticism.

European literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Physical Description:

xiv, 250 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

At the heart of European literary modernism lies a concern with the erotic, and in particular with various forms of what Freud saw as 'sexual aberration', including sadism, masochism, homosexuality, fetishism and necrophilia. Modernist Eroticisms explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in modernist literature: writers whose work is discussed include Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, Édouard Dujardin, Hans Hennyjahnn, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Rachilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valery, Frank Wedekind and Oscar Wilde. Taken together, the essays in this volume explore not only the specificities of the modernist writing of the erotic, but also its decisive role in the shift from conceptions of sexual deviance to those of sexual difference. Book jacket.

Contents:

Innocent monsters : the erotic child in early modernism / Elizabeth Boa

D.H. Lawrence : sex, love, eros and pornography / Michael Bell

Grazing with Marcel Proust / Thomas Baldwin

Seasick in the land of sexuality : Kafka and the erotic / Anna Katharina Schaffner

Polymorphous eroticism in the early plays of Hans Henny Jahnn / Ritchie Robertson

From the erotic to the obscene : Joyce's Ulysses / Jean-Michel Rabaté

Towards a unisex erotics : Claude Cahun and geometric modernism / Emily Apter

The indecent eternal : eroticism in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood / Daniela Caselli

Decomposition : Georges Bataille and the language of necrophilia / Shane Weller

Sexual perversion as textual resistance in the works of Rachilde and Monique Wittig / Lisa Downing

Modernism and the erotics of style / Ben Hutchinson.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 232-245) and index.

ISBN:

9781137030290

1137030291

OCLC:

795175314