{"product_id":"the-erotic-imagination-french-histories-of-perversity-ideologies-of-desire","title":"The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (Ideologies of Desire)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Degenerates are not always criminals  prostitutes  anarchists  or outright lunatics \" the physician and journalist Max Nordau cautioned in 1893  \"they are often writers and artists.\" Indeed  without writers and artists  medical experts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would not have had much of the material on which they based their theories of sexual perversions. Thus it was that Rene Descartes could be diagnosed as a fetishist  because of his inordinate attraction to cross-eyed women  Gustave Flaubert as a hysteric  because of his hypersensitive imagination  and Emile Zola (\"the novelist of the quivering nostrils\") as an epileptoid degenerate  olfactory fetishist  and sexual psychopath  because of the suspicious richness of odors emanating from the pages of his books. Drawing upon the writings of literary figures such as Diderot  Rousseau  Zola  Flaubert  and Huysmans  and physicians and psychologists such as Tardieu  Binet  and Charcot  Vernon Rosario argues that the modern idea of the perverse first emerged in late 18th-century France and was shaped largely by the strange confluence of medical writings  patient confessions  and literary narratives. Beginning with the shocking revelations of masturbation and masochism in Rousseaus Confessions  and the widespread public alarm over the \"fatal convenience\" of the \"solitary vice \" The Erotic Imagination illuminates precisely how various forms of eroticism came to be classified as perversions. Rosario takes the reader through a dizzying proliferation of \"pathologies\"--including the bizarre theories which enabled doctors to identify homosexuals  or \"inverts \" according to bodily stigmata  to the \"uterine fury\" of nymphomania  to an astonishing range of hysterias  fetishes  and erotomanias until finally only marital  reproductive sex survived as normal. Such \"perversification\" of sexual desire attempted to close off and regulate those erotic expressions seen as threatening to the social order  national population  military power  and the supremacy of will and reason. In each case  Rosario argues  the original culprit of deviant behavior was identified as the imagination--a perilous site beyond surveillance  highly susceptible to the salacious effects of literature  where irrational associations might take root and usurp the \"reality\" of conventional sexuality. What emerges most compellingly from Rosarios study is the anxiety produced by the erotic imagination and the elaborate  often desperate theoretical fabrications designed to contain it. Filled with extraordinary case studies and written in prose that is as lively and entertaining as it is insightful  this book offers both a history of the erotic imagination and its narrative expressions  as well as a fascinating mirror in which our contemporary ambivalence about sexuality--from the acrimonious rhetoric of family values to censorship of pornography and hostility towards gays--takes on surprising new significance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44962967158837,"sku":"ByrdShop_0195104838","price":29.25,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780195104837.jpg?v=1770402059","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-erotic-imagination-french-histories-of-perversity-ideologies-of-desire","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}