This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

Sade was a reader, writer and critic deeply immersed in the prose fiction of his time. His own oeuvre brings together diverse traditions of storytelling ranging from anecdotes, whore dialogues and libertine novels to philosophical contes, sentimental fiction and the Gothic novel. While works such as Thérèse philosophe offered him a model for the 120 Days of Sodom and the Histoire de Juliette, Richardson’s Clarissa provided him with a template of virtue in distress which he would repeatedly exploit in novels ranging from Justine to his later historical fiction such as La Marquise de Gange. This chapter explores some of the key tropes Sade borrows from these antecedents, and the ways in which he recycles these tropes – often to very different ends – within a diverse novelistic corpus still viewed too narrowly by critics and publishers alike.

This chapter offers a definition of the libertine novel as the erotic fiction of the Age the Enlightenment. Not only do libertine novels embody the intellectual audacity of the period through their transgressive and free-thinking characters; they also join efforts by scientists and philosophes to unveil the secret workings of the human machine whilst imagining a society fit for it. This chapter contends that this erotic and enlightened fiction represents a crucial element in the history of both literature and ideas, since it epitomises the moment when the Western world first stepped into modernity, challenging old ideals and idols, and redefining pleasure as any individual’s inalienable and natural right.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

The modern concept of decadence owes its origins not only to ancient Rome but also to Europe and Great Britain during the Enlightenment era, a period notorious for the hedonism and hypocrisy of the aristocracy. The social decadence of the period was reflected in its libertine literature, but there is also a close association between libertine behaviour and enlightenment thought. The term ‘libertine’ can be traced back to such rational, scholarly associations of freethinkers as les libertins érudits, a group whose intellectual and ideological goal was the liberation of society from the strictures of religious dogma and authoritarian rule. By providing a rational basis for immorality, Sade and other libertine authors did much to influence later writers customarily regarded as decadent. Yet despite its comprehensibility and even its power and attractiveness today, Enlightenment decadence thrived within a unique nexus of material wealth, transgressive intellectualism, and politicized eroticism that was very much of its time.