Secret Sexualities is expansive in its historical range, vast sources and scholarly research. It contains rare, unpublished, primary material, extensive critical and contextual material by the editor, and refuses to discriminate between issues of sex, sexuality and gender. The coverage includes: * extracts dealing with anatomy and medicine * the cultural construction of eunuchs and hermaphrodites * famous trials for sodomy and the forgotten victims of the law * representations of effeminate men, fops and sodomites * Sapphic texts which portray cross-dressing, mannish women and female husbands

What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).

The Making of English Popular Culture provides an account of the making of popular culture in the nineteenth century. While a form of what we might describe as popular culture existed before this period, John Storey has assembled a collection that demonstrates how what we now think of as popular culture first emerged as a result of the enormous changes that accompanied the industrial revolution. Particularly significant are the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture. Consisting of fourteen original chapters that cover diverse topics ranging from seaside holidays and the invention of Christmas tradition, to advertising, music and popular fiction, the collection aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between culture and power, as explored through areas such as ‘race’, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender. It also aims to encourage within cultural studies a renewed historical sense when engaging critically with popular culture by exploring the historical conditions surrounding the existence of popular texts and practices. Written in a highly accessible style The Making of English Popular Culture is an ideal text for undergraduates studying cultural and media studies, literary studies, cultural history and visual culture.