The book opens with Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator living in London in the 1660s. His candid diary relates the fatal illness of his brother, Tom, who allegedly died of the pox - or did he? The Introduction uses Pepys’ complex reaction to his brother’s ailment, including attempts to get a doctor to make a new diagnosis to clear the family name, as a way into the book’s central themes of deception, shame, unlawful sex, and the essential unknowability of venereal disease. The Introduction provides an overview of the history of disease that lays the groundwork for why the stories in this book matter and how they present evidence of seemingly modern ways of viewing and responding to diseased bodies nearly a hundred years earlier than historians presumed. It then situates the book in the history of medical retailing, sexuality, and the print trade, and ends with a discussion about the history of everyday urban life amidst epidemic disease.

In the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault counters the prevailing view of the Victorian era as sexually repressive, noting instead a proliferation of discourses that coalesced into a science of sexuality. The emergence of modern drama in the late nineteenth century bears out Foucault’s challenge to the repressive hypothesis. This chapter considers the relation between modernist theatre and the history of sexuality as articulated by Foucault, tracing a shared concern with the intertwined figures of the hysterical woman, the sexualised child, the perverse adult, and the reproductive couple. Foregrounding representations of these figures in modernist plays across a range of styles and genres, the chapter suggests the integral role of modernist theatre in the production of modern sexual identities and how, through revivals, adaptations, and performative responses, the modernist dramatic and theatrical archive continues to shape/shift the living, corporealised repertoire of contemporary sexualities/theatricalities.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

The quest for individual freedom was defined and pursued in the twentieth century in an environment shaped by moral norms that were established in the nineteenth century, if not before, but continued to be staunchly defended before undergoing a process of adjustment. At the same time, the question arose of what life would be like once these norms had been shaken off or decisively weakened. Furthermore, the selfhood of those who pushed for liberation was contested between coherence and control, on the one hand, and various modes of transgression, on the other. While such issues were first debated and probed in countercultural circles, they had become a mainstream concern by the end of the century, leading to new uncertainties about how far individual freedom should go and whom it should benefit. This chapter explores how sexuality was restrained by a morality that came to be adjusted in the decades after World War II; how the prospect of a “liberated” life emerged, leading to new expectations, but also creating imbalances and bringing disappointments alongside gains; and how the transgressive urge to expand the ego questioned the norm of coherent selfhood before eventually revealing its darker side.

An introduction to the history of sexuality; to the history of homosexuality; to the notion of queer; to the Victorian and Edwardian periods; to the relation of the Edwardian and contemporary ideas of sexuality; to the themes of the book.

This chapter addresses the connections between queer theory and the history of sexuality. The chapter introduces the origins and development of queer theory as an approach that perceives sexuality and gender as constructed and rejects the notion of fixed and stable identities. The chapter addresses queer theory’s adaptation to different geographical locations and questions related to the translation of the term “queer” from one language to another. It continues with discussing the connections and tensions between queer theory and the history of sexuality, and addresses queer perspectives on the archive and the practice of oral history as topics on which the queer theoretical developments have particular relevance for historians. The chapter focuses on two aspects in queer theory, namely the continuities and ruptures in history as well as queer approaches to temporality. The chapter closes with a short reflection on the future possibilities of utilizing queer theory for studies on the history of sexuality. The chapter argues that while queer theory and contemporary research on the history of sexuality already converge in essential points, such as understanding sexuality as socially constructed and the distrust of ahistorical identities, the relationship between these two still holds unexplored opportunities for research.

Roman rhetoric, deployed as a legal and political tool and as a means of generating social capital, presupposes that the words of the speaker or writer initiate a dynamic, socially efficacious process of reception, and that that process is the real point of speaking or writing at all. Words shape audience reactions; and yet they can’t tightly and precisely control them. The text taken on its own proffers meaning in potentia only. It’s actualized in the reactions of its readers. But readers are multiple, never the reader. Communities of readers are always ad hoc and at best imperfectly coherent, and the consequent instabilities of reception open a space for the articulation of heterodox sexual identities. It is these less stable but potentially more productive aspects of preterition—and with them an expanded understanding of the device that goes beyond the textbook definition—that this book will consider, as they inform a select group of medieval texts whose readerships extended from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and beyond. Contemporary queer theory offers a useful framework through which to analyze these potentially subversive receptions of canonical texts.

This chapter offers a definition of the libertine novel as the erotic fiction of the Age the Enlightenment. Not only do libertine novels embody the intellectual audacity of the period through their transgressive and free-thinking characters; they also join efforts by scientists and philosophes to unveil the secret workings of the human machine whilst imagining a society fit for it. This chapter contends that this erotic and enlightened fiction represents a crucial element in the history of both literature and ideas, since it epitomises the moment when the Western world first stepped into modernity, challenging old ideals and idols, and redefining pleasure as any individual’s inalienable and natural right.

The introduction sets up the book as a dual biography: first, of the pathbreaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), which illuminates the history of the burgeoning Indian nation in the early decades of the twentieth century and, second, of “age” as a category for measuring colonial subjects, upholding the rule of law, and governing intimate life in late colonial India. It locates the contributions of the book in the historiography of India, as well as the broader critical scholarship on postcolonial, sexuality, and childhood studies. It makes a case for historicizing age, beyond using it as a category of analysis. It describes the method of “reading sideways,” by cross-fertilizing postcolonial criticism and queer theory, to offer yet another way of writing histories of gender reform that go beyond historicist narratives of “transition” and accounts of success and failure.

Focusing on a pocket-size edition of Whitman’s poems from the early twentieth century provides an opportunity for thinking about what happens to poems we think we know well when they’re read in different published contexts. Building on the central insight from book historical studies about the inextricability of publication form and literary content, this chapter also engages aspects of the history of sexuality that likewise take shape through the practices of reading and writing. The Little Blue Book edition at this chapter’s heart juxtaposes Whitman’s poems with the writings of another figure in the long US history of sexual liberation: feminist and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Reading Whitman alongside Sanger as the edition urges us to do uncovers unexpected intersections, and sometimes contradictions, at the sites of gender normativity, progressive political reform, and socialism, as well as the backlash against the progressive reforms to which Whitman and Sanger dedicated themselves.