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A survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present,
Desire follows changing attitudes to two major concepts of sexual desire - desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary - through major turning points of European history.
List of contents
List of illustrations Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: sexuality and the problem of western civilization 2 Sex and the city: Greece and Rome 3 Divine desire in ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam 4 From twilight moments to moral panics: the regulation of sex from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century 5 The age of exploration: sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica 6 Enlightening desire: new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 7 In the Victorian twilight: sex out-of-wedlock, sexual commerce, and same-sex desire, 1750–1870 8 Boundaries of the nation, boundaries of the self, 1860–1914 9 Sex and Imperialism 1857-1939 10 Managing desire or consuming sex in interwar culture 11 Sex and the state in the 1930s: Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany 12 The reconstruction of desire and sexual consumerism in postwar Europe Index
About the author
Anna Clark is the author of Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (1987), The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2003), and Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets (2017). She is a professor at the University of Minnesota, USA.
Summary
A survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present, Desire follows changing attitudes to two major concepts of sexual desire – desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary – through major turning points of European history.
