English literary sexology : translations of inversion, 1860-1930

It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within nineteenth-century German sexology. But how were the 'German ideas' translated and transmitted into English culture? This study provides an examination of the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries. English Literary Sexology explores how sexology - the structured theorisation of sex - emerged and was transmitted across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries between the 1860s and the 1930s. If sexology first evolved in German-speaking scientific contexts, then how did it migrate across Europe and North America? To what extent did English sexology distinguish itself from its European counterparts and why did British culture prove increasingly responsive to sexual ideas? How did women contribute to a discourse that from the outset was so heavily dominated by male experts and lay readers? Bauer provides the first sustained examination of how the German sexological ideas found their way into English culture. The book re-examines well-known figures including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand alongside some of their less frequently studied contemporaries such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Edith Ellis. Bauer's study expands our understanding of the European scientia sexualis by showing that alongside the continental sciences of sex existed a distinct English literary sexology Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-20 Disciplining Sex and Subject: Translation, Biography and the Emergence of Sexology in Germany....Pages 21-51 How To Imagine Sexuality?: English Sexology and the Literary Tradition....Pages 52-81 When Sex Is Gender: Feminist Inversion and the Limits of Same-Sex Theory....Pages 82-111 Stephen Gordon Super-Invert: The Sexology of Radclyffe Hall....Pages 112-142 Coda....Pages 143-146 Back Matter....Pages 147-216 It is well known that much of our modern vocabulary of sex emerged within 19th-century German sexology. But how were the 'German ideas' translated into English culture? This study provides an examination of the formation of sexual theory between the 1860s and 1930s and its migration across national and disciplinary boundaries