UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce the publication of The Cambridge World History of Sexualities, featuring two chapters by Professor James Grantham Turner. As CUP tells us, "The Cambridge World History of Sexualities examines sexualities across time and around the world at varying geographic and chronological scales. Featuring over eighty contributions from scholars across more than twenty countries in a number of disciplines, the volumes represent a cross-disciplinary approach that characterizes the history of sexuality as a field in itself." Turner's chapters, "Erotic Literature in History," and "'Pornography', 'Obscenity', and the Suppression of Libertine Literature," appear in Volumes I and IV respectively.
Of his own contribution to the global undertaking of these volumes, Professor Turner writes:
"I had already published books and articles on erotic literature and art, from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, and I had already written survey-chapters for scholarly reference works. So I was thrilled to be included in the biggest one of all, this Cambridge World History of Sexualities. But the thrill turned into panic when the editors made it clear that they really did mean History – all of it, not just the periods I knew – and they really did mean World, not just the European locales where I had studied Latin, Italian, French and English texts. The adventure began: consulting the best experts in Berkeley and beyond, I tracked down with their help the most scholarly translations and commentaries, then read through what each culture considered its erotic masterpiece or most significant guide to sexuality, from the Kama Sutra and Ananga Ranga in India to the Arabic Perfumed Garden, Chinese novels such as The Prayer Mat of Flesh and Zhulin Tales, Japanese pillow books, shunga prints and Ihara Saikaku’s fiction (The Mirror of Male Love, The Life of an Amorous Woman). I needed a central core or pivot to stop this becoming just a list of titles and potted summaries, and I hit upon one lusciously erotic (but not explicit or obscene) work whose roots went back to the earliest recorded writings but whose influence has extended across the globe and up to the present day: the Hebrew Song of Songs. (Notable echoes of that Biblical book include Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.) Those “roots” in Babylonian fertility-cults, Egyptian love-songs and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh then put out side-shoots, comparative studies of creation-myths that involve the sex of a primal cosmic couple. In all I sampled writings from some twenty-four different cultures, from Plato’s Symposium to Nahua tales of Quetzalcoatl’s incest and Berber wedding-songs from North Africa.
Originally my commission was to cover this entire history in one chapter, but it soon grew into two. The most 'hardcore' or 'pornographic' of the European texts had been vehemently condemned and banned: the authors of two of them were actually executed, the notorious Aretino was put on the Index, and many other 'Schools of Venus' ended up in court, including the well-known eighteenth-century novel Fanny Hill. From there it was a short step to the twentieth-century prosecutions of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. As I built up my knowledge for the survey of erotica in Volume One I was amazed to see parallel waves of repression in India, China and Japan. This chapter on extreme 'philosophical' libertinism and its prosecution as 'obscenity' in Volume Four grew up around one startling paradox: 'the cultures richest in sex writing have also been its fiercest suppressors.' "