Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence
$110.00 (F)
Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Author: Sarah Green, University of Oxford
- Date Published: March 2023
- availability: Available
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781108831512
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Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.
Read more- Uses a historically embedded approach to Decadent sexuality to draw unusual and often new connections between Decadent texts and Victorian writing about sexual health, showing the enormous untapped potential for finding new discursive continuities between Decadent and non-Decadent texts
- Introduces readers to a wider range of sources in a field that commonly makes use of a limited canon, incorporating analysis of Decadent authors, texts, and parts of texts that are rarely examined critically, such as Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee's early work, and Walter Pater's unpublished manuscripts
- Looks at how sex and sexuality are represented and written about, rather than actual sexual desires, identities, or actions, thus preserving the historical contingency of sexuality and illustrating the messy, contradictory, and often alien nature of Victorian sexuality
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×Product details
- Date Published: March 2023
- format: Hardback
- isbn: 9781108831512
- length: 274 pages
- dimensions: 235 x 155 x 20 mm
- weight: 0.58kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Loss and gain: the Victorian sexual body
2. 'A passionate coldness': Walter Pater
3. 'A holy indifference and tolerant favour': Lionel Johnson
4. 'An ascetic epicureanism': Vernon Lee
5. 'Men have died of love': George Moore.
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