Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology (palgrave Studies In Modern European Literature)

This volume explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in the work of a range of major European modernists (including Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Mann, Proust and Rilke) as well as in that of some less-well-known figures of the period such as Dujardin and Jahnn. 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, ¡douard Dujardin, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Vaľry, 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 Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-22 Innocent Monsters: The Erotic Child in Early Modernism....Pages 23-43 D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Love, Eros — and Pornography....Pages 44-62 Grazing with Marcel Proust....Pages 63-79 Seasick in the Land of Sexuality: Kafka and the Erotic....Pages 80-104 Polymorphous Eroticism in the Early Plays of Hans Henny Jahnn....Pages 105-122 From the Erotic to the Obscene: Joyce’s Ulysses ....Pages 123-133 Towards a Unisex Erotics: Claude Cahun and Geometric Modernism....Pages 134-149 The “Indecent” Eternal’: Eroticism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ....Pages 150-168 Decomposition: Georges Bataille and the Language of Necrophilia....Pages 169-194 Sexual Perversion as Textual Resistance in the Works of Rachilde and Monique Wittig....Pages 195-212 Modernism and the Erotics of Style....Pages 213-231 Back Matter....Pages 232-250