In this profoundly original and far-reaching study, Robert M. Polhemus shows how novels have helped to make erotic love a matter of faith in modern life. Erotic faith, Polhemus argues, is an emotional conviction—ultimately religious in nature—that meaning, value, hope, and even the possibility of transcendence can be found in love. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Polhemus shows the reciprocity of love as subject, the novel as form, and faith as motive in important works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Throughout, Polhemus relates the novelists' representation of love to that of such artists as Botticelli, Vermeer, Claude Lorrain, Redon, and Klimt. Juxtaposing their paintings with nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts both reveals the ways in which novels develop and individualize common erotic and religious themes and illustrates how the novel has influenced our perception of all art.
"This volume features a recently rediscovered cache of captivating portraits from another time and place: a golden age of cinema and cabaret in Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. The Manasses, a husband-and-wife team from the Viennese beau monde, used retouching techniques to create surreal and noir images that seethe with an erotic symbolism barely concealed beneath a mask of glamorous styling, elegant poses, and extravagant costumes. Photographic historian Monika Faber examines this work as part of the world of cinema-enthralled Vienna, while an accompanying D. H. Lawrence story adds literary resonance to the erotic charge of these extraordinary images."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The images produced by the Manasse photographic studio, published in magazines all over Europe, seethe with an erotic symbolism which is barely concealed beneath a mask of glamorous styling, elegant poses and extravagant clothing.
It was the sitting-room of a mean house standing in line with hundreds of others of the same kind along a wide road in South London. Now and again the trams hummed by but the room was foreign to the trams and to the sound of the London traffic.
She may be sodomized and taken in contemptuous anger, as in Lady Chatterly's Lover, and is depicted as enjoying this. The enthusiasm for the sodomizing of woman is quite clearly there in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Mr. Noon. Some critics have spoken of this as a "holy communion," but Holbrook sees it as a denial of woman, an avoidance of the matrix where the ghost of the dead mother lurks. In the end, in The Plumed Serpent, an intelligent American woman submits herself to the fascistic domination of two murderers who are running a new religious-political campaign, while forfeiting even her capacity for orgasm. Everything in Lawrence's work leads to this false solution. Yet such critics as F.R. Leavis commend Lawrence for his concepts of "manhood"--And even endorse such stories as The Virgin and the Gypsy, in which a duplicitous traveler seduces a young girl in vengeance on the middle class.
While his work as a writer has long overshadowed his painting DH Lawrence was accomplished at both, and for the first time, this book brings them together for the world to see.
Over a century before 50 Shades of Grey, novels of feminine passions had been setting the stage and bending the morals laws which made erotica novels possible. Fanny Hill is an erotic novel by English novelist John Cleland. One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history, it has become a synonym for obscenity. Venus in Furs is a novella by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the best known of his works. The novel draws themes, like female dominance and sadomasochism, and character inspiration heavily from Sacher-Masoch's own life. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words. This edition is a collection of these three erotica classics, perfect for study or inspiration for your own writing muse.