Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

William A. Cohen

Published by Duke University Press 1996

Sex Scandal

The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

William A. Cohen

In the series Series Q

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822398028

Overview
Contents

About this book

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages—and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot’s lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope’s whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens’s masturbating characters, William A. Cohen’s study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness.
Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870–71, from Eliot’s and Trollope’s novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde’s writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature.
Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies.

Author / Editor information

William A. Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Reviews

“A provocative study, extremely well–written, engaging, and intelligent throughout. Through a series of detailed and nuanced readings, Cohen argues persuasively that novelistic discourse and the discourse of scandal were inextricably bound up with each other. Each of his extended literary analyses contains a series of observations that brilliantly clarifies the specific dynamics of literary semantics.”—Mary L. Poovey, Johns Hopkins University

“Far more refreshing and delicious than any of the ostensibly succulent fare routinely cooked up for enquiring minds by our contemporary scandal sheets, Cohen’s readings and writings induce the exhilarating shock of gay literary and cultural criticism at its most acute. With seductive intelligence and stylistic verve, Sex Scandal offers a sophisticated treatment of a rich, fascinating, and underinterpreted topic whose pertinence to contemporary culture becomes more obvious every day. A dazzling performance.”—Joseph Litvak, Bowdoin College

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 Sex, Scandal, and the Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Manual Conduct in Great Expectations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
3 Privacy and Publicity in the Victorian Sex Scandal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
4 Schadenfreude in The Mill on the Floss Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
5 Trollope's Trollop Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
6 Indeterminate Wilde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 272

eBook

Published: August 28, 1996
ISBN: 9780822398028