Charting the construction of sexual perversions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical, psychiatric and psychological discourse, Schaffner argues that sexologists' preoccupation with these perversions was a response to specifically modern concerns, and illuminates the role of literary texts in the formation of sexological knowledge.

Modern society, Michael Trask argues in this incisive and original book, chose to couch class difference in terms of illicit sexuality. Trask demonstrates how sexual science's concept of erotic perversion mediated the writing of both literary figures and social theorists when it came to the innovative and unsettling social arrangements of the early twentieth century. Trask focuses on the James brothers in a critique of pragmatism and anti-immigrant sentiment, shows the influence of behavioral psychology on Gertrude Stein's work, uncovers a sustained reflection on casual labor in Hart Crane's lyric poetry, and traces the identification of working-class Catholics with deviant passions in Willa Cather's fiction. Finally, Trask examines how literary leftists borrowed the antiprostitution rhetoric of Progressive-era reformers to protest the ascendance of consumerism in the 1920s.Viewing class as a restless and unstable category, Trask contends, American modernist writers appropriated sexology's concept of evasive, unmoored desire to account for the seismic shift in social relations during the Progressive era and beyond. Looking closely at the fraught ideological space between real and perceived class differences, Cruising Modernism discloses there a pervasive representation of sexuality as well.

"In The Opposite of Desire, Tonya Krouse argues that explicit depictions of sex and sexuality operate as central sites of modernist aesthetic experimentation. To explore the aesthetic repercussions of these scenes in the novels of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, Krouse resists the common critical approach of reading such representations through theories of desire, obscenity, or pornography. Instead, she examines these depictions in terms of "the opposite of desire," or pleasure, and this approach allows Krouse to historicize these novelists' preoccupations with entering into discourses on sex and sexuality." "Examining explicit representations of sex and sexuality in modernist novels, Krouse asserts that these scenes provide a lens through which to examine modernist aesthetic interests as well as the centrality of issues surrounding sex, sexuality, and gender in the modernist period. Approaching scenes of sex and sexuality with the aid of Michel Foucault's theories about sexual discourses, The Opposite of Desire thoroughly examines modernist attempts to put pleasure into representation."--BOOK JACKET.

In an exploration of the complex relations between women and the modern, this work challenges conventional male-centred theories of modernity. It examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution and perversion.

Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified. Proliferating technologies command our attention. Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread. We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome. Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon. Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing. It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption. Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms. Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

In this groundbreaking new book, Jones shows how some of the major determining leaders in modern thought and culture have rationalized their own immoral behavior and projected it onto a universal canvas. The main thesis of this book is that, in the intellectual life, there are only two ultimate alternatives: either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire. In the last one hundred years, the western cultural elite embarked upon a project which entailed the reversal of the values of the intellectual life so that truth would be subjected to desire as the final criterion of intellectual value. In looking at recent biographies of such major moderns as Freud, Kinsey, Keynes, Margaret Mead, Picasso, and others, there is a remarkable similarity between their lives and thought. After becoming involved in sexual license early on, they invariably chose an ideology or art form which subordinated reality to the exigencies of their sexual misbehavior.

Amorous Acts uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how queer theory is operating to put in place a non-heterosexist social order.