This week's book diary focuses on a topic which is, apparently, near and dear to many hearts.
Erotic fiction.
I don't necessarily want to talk about driving pulp porn stories, scintillating penthouse forum, or larger-than-life hooters magazine. Instead, I would like to concentrate on erotic fiction as delectable art form, and on the erotic found in mainstream and genre literature.
Of course, erotic fiction goes way back, at least as far as writing and reading do. In order to keep this diary to a manageable length (and girth), I'd also like to concentrate on plumbing the depths of modern (say, 17th century onwards) erotic fiction. Otherwise, we'll be here all night.
Not that that's a bad thing, in and of itself.
Tittilated yet? Read on below...
Almost from the beginning of modern erotic fiction, women have dominated (no pun intended) the genre. There's a difference, it seems, between what most women want in arousing books and what most men want or gravitate towards. Women tend to be more emotional, more cerebral in sexuality, while men are more visual and more visceral. And so in modern erotic fiction, we find voices like Aprha Benn and Mary Delariviere Manley. And it wasn't just erotica...
The true pioneers of the novel form, however, were the women writers pursuing their craft in opposition to the classically refined precepts of the writers defining the Augustan Age. Particularly influential were Aphra Behn's travel narrative Oroonoko (1688) and her erotic epistolary novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1683). In Oroonoko, Behn provides numerous details of day to day life and a conversational narrative voice, while with Love Letters she pioneered the epistolary form for a longer work of fiction, over fifty years before Richardson. The political prose satires of Mary Delariviere Manley were racy exposés of high-society scandals written in the tradition of Love Letters, Behn's erotic roman à clef. Manley's novels The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zaraians (1705) and The New Atalantis (1709) were widely popular in their day and helped create an audience for prose narratives that was large enough to support the new breed of the professional novelist.
More Here
Then, of course, there was Fanny Hill by John Cleland.
Written in 1749 while Cleland was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered the first "erotic" novel (although anonymous works in other languages had certainly appeared before, from the Goliard poetry of the medieval period to Dutch pornographic wood cuts with text to the French Autobiography of a Flea), and has become a byword for the battle of censorship of erotica. Initially, there was no reaction to the novel from the government. However, as the book became popular, pirate editions appeared. In particular, though, two chapters were interpolated into the book depicting homosexuality between men, which Fanny observes through a chink in the wall. Once this edition began to appear, the Church of England, along with many others, asked the British Secretary of State to "stop the progress of this vile Book, which is an open insult upon Religion and good manners". As a result, Cleland was arrested and charged with "corrupting the King's subjects."
From Wikipedia Article Here
An Excerpt-Fanny finds herself alone in the big city, under the tutelage of a woman who has mislead her, slightly.
My breasts, if it is not too bold a figure to call so two hard, firm, rising hillocks, that just began to shew themselves, or signify anything to the touch, employ'd and amus'd her hands a-while, till, slipping down lower, over a smooth track, she could just feel the soft silky down that had but a few months before put forth and garnish'd the mount-pleasant of those parts, and promised to spread a grateful shelter over the seat of the most exquisite sensation, and which had been, till that instant, the seat of the most insensible innocence. Her fingers play'd and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss, which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament.
Complete book in e-format Here
Interesting stuff, if a bit impenetrable in its ubiqutous prosaic ivy. This sort of english writing drives me mad, and I cannot read it to this day. It's too ornamented for my tastes.
Truth be told, I don't read much erotic fiction. What I've read has mostly been limited to Anais Nin, an Olympia Reader or two, and passages encountered in what I thought were ordinary books. And so, on that note, I'm going to turn the floor over to you, readers, on the following topics.
- What's the difference between pornography and erotica? This is not an absolute, definitive meaning request, just grist for discussion.
- Who is your favorite writer of erotic fiction?
- Any websites or compliations you'd care to share with us?
- What popular writer does the best sex scenes?
- and of course, what have you read lately?
It was hard writing this. But I hope that you all find it immensely gratifying, and can bring it to its satisfying conclusion. After all, it's always more fun to get there with your friends.