About this item
A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London. At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day.
About the Author
Deborah Lutz is the Thruston B. Morton Professor of English at the University of Louisville. Her scholarship focuses on material culture; the history of attitudes toward death and mourning; the history of sexuality, pornography and erotica; and gender and gay studies. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, collections, and newspapers, including The New York Times; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Victorian Literature and Culture; The Oxford History of the Novel in English, and Cabinet. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, NPR, Salon, The History Channel, and many other news outlets. She is the editor of the fourth Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre.
Her most recent book, The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (W.W. Norton, 2015) , was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her others books include Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015) , which was supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006) ; and Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton, 2011) .
