Erotic Discourses in History, Culture and the Arts

This volume examines the enduring entanglement of erotic desire with political, cultural, and historical change. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship, it explores how sex, sexuality, and eroticism both shape and are shaped by historical narratives, across diverse periods, geographies, and media. The chapters address secrecy, colonial and imperial regimes, regulation, and acts of resistance, revealing how the erotic functions as a site of power, negotiation, and subversion. Case studies range from historical correspondence and colonial medical debates to queer romance, feminist art, and contemporary queer theory, engaging with contexts from People's Poland to post-independence Lithuania, Thatcher-era Britain, and beyond. This book will be of value to scholars and students of history, literary and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, art history, and queer theory. Its multidisciplinary approach offers both specific historical insights and broader methodological reflections on how the study of eroticism can illuminate the workings of power and resistance. By foregrounding the erotic as a dynamic historical force, the volume invites readers to reconsider the intimate links between pleasure, politics, and the past, and to see sexuality as central to understanding human experience across time.

Aleksandra Musial-Pudelko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Nina Augustynowicz is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Agnieszka Podruczna is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

Introduction, Aleksandra Musial-Pudelko, Nina Augustynowicz, and Agnieszka Podruczna Part I: Secrets and the Unspeakable 1. Male Sexuality and Erotic Pleasure in Greek Autobiographical Discourses of the 1870s, Dimitra Vassiliadou 2. Infectious Corruption: Sexual Violence in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, Justyna Jajszczok Part II: Colonial Anxieties and Regimes of Desire 3. Seminal Debates: Masculinity, Male Fertility, and Impotence in Early Colonial New Spain (1550-1620), Jacqueline Holler 4. "Dreams of Ends": History, Sex, and Storytelling in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Albany Murdoch 5. Queer Temporalities: Mediating Desire Through the Historical Account in Postcolonial Speculative Fiction, Agnieszka Podruczna Part III: Regulation and Education 6. Surveillance of Homosexual Priests Under the Legal and Regulatory Discourses of People's Poland, Agnieszka Laddach 7. Framing Sexuality: Media Liberalization and State Oversight in Post- Independence Lithuania, Kotryna Beciute 8. "Margaret Thatcher Has Basically Made Me Pro-Blow Job": Teenage Sexuality, Thatcherism, and (Post)feminism in How to Build a Girl, Nina Augustynowicz 9. "You and Me and History": Queer Romance and Liberal Fantasy in Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue, Aleksandra Musial-Pudelko Part IV: Resistance and Celebration 10. Eroticism as Resistance and Subversion: The Case of the "Three Marias" and Their Book New Portuguese Letters, Ricardo Rato Rodrigues 11. Sense and Sexuality of the Female Body: Women's Subversion of Patriarchy in the Studio, Lawrence Buttigieg 12. The Gift in Lube: Derrida, Foucault, and Fisting, Killian O' Dwyer