Saturday, October 20, 2012

BETWEEN THE COVERS: EROTICA THROUGH THE AGES

from We Love This Book


Lucy Mangan tells us how E.L. James' Fifty Shades trilogy is actually part of a long tradition of titillating titles
What is erotica? For the purposes of this piece, let’s say it is written material designed primarily to arouse. Unless you count the Old Testament’s strangely sensual Song of Songs (in which case, congratulations and commiserations on the hair-trigger sensitivity of your libido), our salacious story begins with the ancient Greeks, whose Straton of Sardis produced an anthology of erotic epigrams entitled The Boyish Muse. He has since been overshadowed by Sappho, a female poet from the island of Lesbos, from whose name and proclivities (at least as they were perceived by later readers) we get the terms ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’. When an entire sexual orientation is named in your honour, you know you’ve made it.




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