English Literary Sexology

English Literary Sexology explores how sexology - the structured theorisation of sex - emerged and was transmitted across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries between the 1860s and the 1930s. If sexology first evolved in German-speaking scientific contexts, then how did it migrate across Europe an [...]
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English Literary Sexology explores how sexology - the structured theorisation of sex - emerged and was transmitted across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries between the 1860s and the 1930s. If sexology first evolved in German-speaking scientific contexts, then how did it migrate across Europe and North America? To what extent did English sexology distinguish itself from its European counterparts and why did British culture prove increasingly responsive to sexual ideas? How did women contribute to a discourse that from the outset was so heavily dominated by male experts and lay readers? Bauer provides the first sustained examination of how the German sexological ideas found their way into English culture. The book re-examines well-known figures including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand alongside some of their less frequently studied contemporaries such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Edith Ellis. Bauer's study expands our understanding of the European scientia sexualis by showing that alongside the continental sciences of sex existed a distinct English literary sexology.