In this bold, sweeping reassessment of Modernism, Seelow challenges standard versions of postmodernism and proposes a notion of radical modernism. He presents a provocative thesis through stimulating reconsiderations of three related but different radical moderns: Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence. Defining sexuality as Modernism's core feature, Seelow situates Freud, Reich, and Lawrence as frontier thinkers. Starting with a history of sexuality as both phenomenon and field of study Seelow then discloses Freud's theory of sexuality's masochistic underpinnings. Reich's materialist thought, which radicalizes Freud's libido theory while fashioning an emancipatory sense of self, is also offered. Radical theories also illuminate Lady Chatterley's Lover, and many of Lawrence's great short works. Finally, Seelow, following Kristeva's recent work, stresses the value of revolt in preserving the life of the mind in a morally devalued world.

Frieda Lawrence once remarked, «Nobody seems to have an idea of the quality of Lawrence's and my relationship, the essence of it.... The deep attraction was there and that was what counts.» This insightful and original study investigates how one of the finest literary minds of the twentieth century experienced deep sexual attraction. In close readings of all of D. H. Lawrence's major novels, Douglas Wuchina charts the growth of sexual attraction between Lawrencian couples as it affects both body and spirit. The theoretical framework is not Foucault's or Lacan's or Bakhtin's but Lawrence's own, with frequent reference to his innovative theory of the chakras and his rejection of modern partnership marriage in favor of «blood» attraction. Drawing on a variety of sources, psychological and sexological in addition to literary - this is one of the first studies to make extensive use of revealing drafts that have only recently become available in the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's works - Destinies of Splendor persuasively argues that the familiar strategies of Freudian pathologization and feminist denigration of Lawrence are not viable and that it is possible to reaffirm Lawrence's romantically sensitive vision of the sexual bond between man and woman.

"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 this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

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.

From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism. Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.