Sexual Outcasts presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850. Each volume follows the means by which prohibitions and taboos were produced and circulated. The reader can therefore explore the processes that disciplined the representation of the body and the constuction of sexual outcasts.This four-volume set presents a wide range of textual material: criminal reports; scientific and medical publications; newspaper items; sex manuals; guidebooks; speculative accounts, and case histories. The variety of sources permits a multiple perspective on the body, sexual drives, gendered psychologies and perverse behaviour across the century.

Sexual Outcasts presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850. Each volume follows the means by which prohibitions and taboos were produced and circulated. The reader can therefore explore the processes that disciplined the representation of the body and the constuction of sexual outcasts.This four-volume set presents a wide range of textual material: criminal reports; scientific and medical publications; newspaper items; sex manuals; guidebooks; speculative accounts, and case histories. The variety of sources permits a multiple perspective on the body, sexual drives, gendered psychologies and perverse behaviour across the century.

Sexual Outcasts presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850. Each volume follows the means by which prohibitions and taboos were produced and circulated. The reader can therefore explore the processes that disciplined the representation of the body and the constuction of sexual outcasts.This four-volume set presents a wide range of textual material: criminal reports; scientific and medical publications; newspaper items; sex manuals; guidebooks; speculative accounts, and case histories. The variety of sources permits a multiple perspective on the body, sexual drives, gendered psychologies and perverse behaviour across the century.

A Shakespearean actor who made his career on the public stage, whose sex life was known and discussed in Britain, America and France, Edmund Kean has inspired numerous writings, many biographies among them. But until now, no work has tackled the complicated and fascinating story of his literary appropriation, both in his own day and after his death. Dealing with the way a variety of canonical authors-including Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Dumas, Twain and Sartre-appropriated Kean through the centuries, The Cult of Kean traces a remarkable literary legacy. In each chapter Jeffrey Kahan discusses how many of history's greatest figures viewed Kean, and how these figures examined and discussed themselves in relation to-or projected themselves onto-a variety of constructions of the great actor. Kahan first explores the rise of Kean in light of rising democratic sympathies, then in light of Kean's equally autocratic dealings with playwrights, among them John Keats. He looks at Kean's sexual shenanigans at Drury Lane, exploring them in the wider social context of infidelity; and explores perceptions of Kean in America, during his 1820-1 and 1825-6 tours. The Cult of Kean cites many letters from Kean's mother and still others from his wife, none of which have been published previously. The study also features rare and interesting paintings of Kean, as well as depictions of how writers, actors and film makers continue to add to his remarkable literary legacy.

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.