Modernist Eroticisms—European Literature After Sexology

At the heart of European literary modernism lies a concern with the erotic, and in particular with various forms of what Freud saw as "sexual aberration," including sadism, masochism, homosexuality, fetishism and necrophilia. Modernist Eroticisms explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in modernist literature: writers whose work is discussed include Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, Edouard Dujardin, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul ValEry, Frank Wedekind and Oscar Wilde. Taken together, the essays in this volume explore not only the specificities of the modernist writing of the erotic, but also its decisive role in the shift from conceptions of sexual deviance to those of sexual difference.

ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER teaches Comparative Literature and is Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, UK. Her publications include Sprachzerlegung in historischer Avantgardelyrik und konkreter Poesie (2007) and Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930 (2012).


SHANE WELLER is a professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (2008), and Modernism and Nihilism (2011).