Product Description

Saturnalia is a collection of the most exciting, surreal and bizarre passages from a selection of classic works concerning sex and sexuality. It gathers together prose that straddles the divide between erotic and mainstream literature, stripping away the hidebound and getting straight to the sex! The book will feature extracts from, among others, Aubrey Beardsley, Huysmans, de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, along with confections as diverse as Swinburne and Li Yu. Extracts from their most scandalous and licentious texts will be gathered together for the first time as Saturnalia takes a look at the relationship between sex, fetishism and misrule.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #731987 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 206 pages

Review
A collection of exciting, surreal and bizarre passages from a number of classic works concerning sex and sexuality.

About the Author
Paul Scott is an editor of erotic fiction.

Customer Reviews

Hit Me Baby One More Time
...this book [contains] works that cover thousands of years as well as thousands of miles: one of the most interesting (and arousing) extracts is from Li Yu's _Carnal Prayer Mat_, a seventeenth-century classic of Chinese pornography whose perversity and subtlety make the Marquis de Sade, who also appears here, seem rather like a red bristly barbarian. But then that's what he was in a lot of ways: subtlety is not de Sade's strong suit and he doesn't play it here in the extract from _Justine_.

Europe's end (among other things) is kept up not just by Catullus, Boccaccio, Huysmans, and Mirbeau, but also by the editor of the collection, who ties everything together with introductions and potted bios that have certainly made me look at pornography in new ways. It isn't just about one hand clapping, and it isn't just about pleasure -- though anyone who's familiar with the Nexus imprint will already know that. Porn has always commented on society, and S&M porn comments particularly on power. It subverts and satirizes it too, and readers who fail to recognize the humour in de Sade or Swinburne or Sacher-Masoch are going to be missing a lot of the point.

Not many readers of this book will, though: the Saturnalia were the December festivals in ancient Rome that put the licence into licentiousness, but the editor doesn't actually say so and doesn't bandy words like "Dionysiac" and "bacchantic". He knows Nexus readers won't need to be told: this is intelligent, literate writing for intelligent, literate readers. The translations from French, Italian, German, and Chinese are all excellent, flavoured with period and setting without being overwhelmed by them, and the biggest disappointment I had was with something that hadn't been translated: the title of the Swinburne section -- "Swish Fulfilment" -- isn't matched by the selections from the mad flagellist that follow. Flogging schoolboys' bottoms was never my thing, but fortunately there are a lot of things elsewhere that are. The S&M seam -- and scene -- is by no means worked out with this volume, of course, and it isn't only lips that will be licked in anticipation of a further volume promising such treats as the eighteenth century inspiration behind the _Vagina Monologues_. Literary wanderlust or lubricious Wanda-lust: it's all satisfied here.