Download or read book The Erotic History of France written by Henry L. Marchand and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction. THIS book sets itself the interesting and intriguing task of writing the erotic history of France and its erotic literature. Perhaps someone will inquire why we choose such a theme, and what profit is to be derived from a knowledge of the numerous piquant and gallant details that we shall meet on our quest. It is possible, too, that some reader will wonder about the latter part of the title: The History of French Erotic Literature. What is the justification for this phrase? Let us spend a few moments now in trying to understand why France should be chosen as the subject of an erotic history; why the history of the vast system of practices connected with the most unbridled and diverse expression of sex life in the land of the Gauls is of importance for us. Then we shall be in a position to realize the tremendous value of French erotic writings, which shall be our guides in our expedition through this land of love. It is a nice question whether there is an essential and an all-pervasive difference between the different races of mankind. But whatever be the truth about this very moot question, it is an indisputable fact that France has for many centuries been renowned as the home par excellence of eroticism, and Frenchmen as the typical representatives of the erotic spirit and practitioners of the erotic art. This by no means implies that there is something inherent in the French which impels them to this type of activity. We are merely stating a fact which can be buttressed by numerous phenomena, historical and sociological. Many investigators have asserted the fundamental unity of all nations, and have even denied that there has been any development through the course of history, by which modern men, for instance, have come into the possession of new traits of character or elements of physical structure. The French critic - Remy de Gourmont - has gone so far as to develop a quasi-law of history which claims that in all ages and in all climes men are alike, and the same diversities which separated classes of men and individuals at a bygone age are still observable today, mutatis mutandis. If this view is true, and we incline to believe that it is, then the sources for the development and importance of the erotic motif in French culture are to be led back not to certain structural peculiarities of the French people but to certain peculiarities in their history and sociological organization. Just at what date these traits first became manifest it is difficult to assert with precision. During the Renaissance period, when new blood began to run in the veins of the awakened and enlightened Europeans, and the first fruits of the new culture became documented in literature, we are already able to discern the strength of this motif. Of course at this time other nations of Europe, the Italians principally and also the Germans, were producing similar works. Indeed, the beginning of this literature as forsooth of the whole drive and potency of the Renaissance is to be seen in Italy; but at any rate this direction manifested in literature was the reflection of tendencies continued, developed, and augmented which at a later date made France the mundane residence of Venus in Europe....
Download or read book Sex History of France and Its Erotic Literature written by Henry Marchand and published by Fredonia Books (NL). This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is divided into four main headings: Medieval and Renaissance, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, The Eighteenth Century, and, The Nineteenth Century. Some of the chapter headings include: Sexuality in Medieval France, Indecent Fabliaux and Farces, Troubadours and Courts of Love, Anti-Royal and Anti-Church Literature, The Obscenity of the Theatres, Secret Clubs and Perversions, Celebrated Pornologists, Pornographia Rampant, Babylon on the Seine, The Napoleonic Regime, The Reign of the Prostitute, The Heyday of Obscene Art, and Publishers of Erotica, and many more. This exciting chronicle of La France rotique includes a history of French erotic literature which should appeal to every bibliophile. The volume covers secret love-clubs, clandestine dens, obscene art, private theatres, complicated brothel systems, priapic and sotadic verses, flagellation, and a host of other eroscenic curiosities.
Download or read book The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance written by Katherine Crawford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-22 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.
Download or read book Sexing Political Culture in the History of France written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Extremities written by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.
Download or read book Women for Hire written by Alain Corbin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Corbin depicts prostitution in nineteenth-century France not as a vice, crime, or disease, but as a well-organized business. Corbin reveals how the brothel served the sex industry in the same way that the factory served manufacturing: it provided an institution for the efficient and profitable sale of services.
Download or read book The Sexual Life of Catherine M written by Catherine Millet and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex - this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.'s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, she describes her erotic experiences in precise and beautiful detail. A phenomenal bestseller throughout Europe, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., like Fifty Shades of Grey, breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines many alternative manifestations of desire. Told in spare, elegant prose, her story will shock, enlighten and liberate you.
Download or read book Sodomites Pederasts and Tribades in Eighteenth Century France written by Jeffrey Merrick and published by . This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Jeffrey Merrick brings together a rich array of primary-source documents-many of which are published or translated here for the first time-that depict in detail the policing of same-sex populations in eighteenth-century France and the ways in which Parisians regarded what they called sodomy or pederasty and tribadism. Taken together, these documents suggest that male and female same-sex relations played a more visible public role in Enlightenment-era society than was previously believed. The translated and annotated sources included here show how robust the same-sex subculture was in eighteenth-century Paris, as well as how widespread the policing of sodomy was at the time. Part 1 includes archival police records from the 1720s to the 1780s that show how the police attempted to manage sodomitical activity through surveillance and repression; part 2 includes excerpts from treatises and encyclopedias, published nouvelles (collections of news) and libelles (libelous writings), fictive portrayals, and Enlightenment treatments of the topic that include calls for legal reform. Together these sources show how contemporaries understood same-sex relations in multiple contexts and cultures, including their own. The resulting volume is an unprecedented look at the role of same-sex relations in the culture and society of the era. The product of years of archival research curated, translated, and annotated by a premier expert in the field, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France provides a foundational primary text for the study and teaching of the history of sexuality.
Download or read book Erotic Exchanges written by Nina Kushner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being “kept.” Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture. Kushner’s primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what these women and their clients did. Rather than reduce the history of sex work to the history of its regulation, Kushner interprets these materials in a way that unlocks these women’s own experiences. Kushner analyzes prostitution as a form of work, examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons, mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money, gifts, and, on occasion, love in making and breaking the bonds between women and men. This vivid and engaging book explores elite prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the family.
Download or read book Daughters of Eve written by Lenard R. Berlanstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous and seductive, female stage performers haunted French public life in the century before and after the Revolution. This pathbreaking study delineates the distinctive place of actresses, dancers, and singers within the French erotic and political imaginations. From the moment they became an unofficial caste of mistresses to France's elite during the reign of Louis XIV, their image fluctuated between emasculating men and delighting them. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, society columns, theater criticism, government reports, autobiographies, public rituals, and a huge corpus of fiction, Lenard Berlanstein argues that the public image of actresses was shaped by the political climate and ruling ideology; thus they were deified in one era and damned in the next. Tolerated when civil society functioned and demonized when it faltered, they finally passed from notoriety to celebrity with the stabilization of parliamentary life after 1880. Only then could female fans admire them openly, and could the state officially recognize their contributions to national life. Daughters of Eve is a provocative look at how a culture creates social perceptions and reshuffles collective identities in response to political change.
Download or read book Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau written by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and published by Dedalus Europe 1998 S. This book was released on 1998 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Gothic tale in the manner of the Marquis de Sade and Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden. It was originally published anonymously in Paris in 1953. When the unnamed narrator crosses the causeway to the Chateau of Gamehuche, he enters a surrealist nightmare of debauchery and violence. The proceedings at the chateau are presided over by the master of Gamehuche, M. de Montcul, formerly the English diplomat, Sir Horatio Mountarse. With a cast of willing and not-so-willing acolytes, he serves up an over-refined cuisine of obscenity, sexual perversion and unspeakable cruelty. The book could be described as a dispatch written from the frontiers of depravity. J. Fletcher's translation is the first English version of Pieyre de Mandiargues disturbing cult classic.
Download or read book Horizontal Collaboration written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mel Gordon's companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.
Download or read book The Libertine Reader written by Michel Feher and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 1388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism.
Download or read book Emmanuelle written by Emmanuelle Arsan and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young woman discovers the boundless potential of her sexuality in this “lyrical and graphic” international bestselling classic novel of joyful eroticism (NPR). It begins with nineteen-year-old Emmanuelle’s flight from London to join her husband in Bangkok. On the airplane, she is seduced by the passenger seated next to her. By the time they land, she has indulged her irrepressible and insatiable sexual appetite, embarking on an odyssey of hedonistic sensual discovery that takes her from the arms of her husband to intimate encounters with the wives of his business associates, to further explorations wherein the philosophical and aesthetic facets of eroticism are expounded—and enacted—to the fullest degree. Much like Anne Desclos’ The Story of O and Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus, Emmanuelle is as pertinent today as it was when it was first published in 1967, a thrilling reminder of “how this revolutionary epic had an impact on the sexual liberation of women” (Le Parisien Magazine). “Emmanuelle is not just sex; it is an eroticism that is vintage, oneiric, utopian, and tender, an optimistic and radiant eroticism.” —Le Point “Emmanuelle’s eroticism is not pathological, unlike the eroticism of revolt. It is a crucial part of the satisfaction of the individual, which feels threatened by nothing, which unfolds in harmony with the world: an eroticism of perfect accord.” —Le Magazine Littéraire “Lyrical and graphic . . . But it’s not all salacious play-by-play. The sex scenes are interspersed with abstract musings about the nature of sex. . . . In short, it arouses.” —Teddy Wayne, NPR
Download or read book A History of Erotic Literature written by Patrick J. Kearney and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History of Sexuality written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1990-04-14 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.
Download or read book L Origine written by Lilianne Milgrom and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "L'Origine got me hooked--what a story! Milgrom brings the reader right along on her adventures as a copyist of one of the most well-known paintings in all the world." --Harriet Welty Rochefort, author of French Fried, French Toast, Joie de Vivre, and Final Transgression The riveting odyssey of one of the world's most scandalous works of art. In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, viewed by millions of visitors a year. As the first artist authorized by the Orsay Museum to re-create Courbet's The Origin of the World, author Lilianne Milgrom was thrust into the painting's intimate orbit, spending six weeks replicating every fold, crevice, and pubic hair. The experience inspired her to share her story and the painting's riveting clandestine history with readers beyond the confines of the art world. L'Origine is an entertaining and superbly researched work of historical fiction that traces the true story of the painting's unlikely tale of survival, replete with French revolutionaries, Turkish pashas, and nefarious Nazi captains. But L'Origine is more than a riveting romp through history--it also sheds light on society's complex relationship with the female body.
