The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity

by Vernon A. Rosario

"Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, or outright lunatics," the physician and journalist Max Nordau cautioned in 1893, "they are often writers and artists." Indeed, without writers and artists, medical experts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would not have had much of the material on which they based their theories of sexual perversions. Thus it was that Rene Descartes could be diagnosed as a fetishist, because...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195104838
• ISBN13: 9780195104837
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Interesting views overweighed by technical terminologies

This book is a fascinating read as one learns about how medical journals dedicated themselves to sexual psychotic behaviors in the Napoleonic era of France. It seems that medical journals were relished by many as the pornographic/erotic material of its age. The problem though with this book is that it fails to draw any conclusions even as ot proclaims itself to be an analysis and psychological study of historical material. The writer often bogs down the writing with lots of technical writing and phrasings while often putting in repitious reportage of events. It is an interesting read for someone fascinated with either this era of history or with the evolution of psychology but more than likely will leave a cold impression on those that have only a passing interest in the material or are hoping for titulation.