Look at me, reading shit and all

[lunabee34]

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this one. I knew a little bit about most of the people discussed in this book (you can't study Victorian literature without knowing bit about Richard Burton or Swinburne or the Rossettis, for example) but only the very superficial. This is a really interesting look at several loosely connected and intersecting groups of people (the pre-Raphaelites, the Cannibal Club, and the Aesthetes) and how their art and lives were focused on their sexual experiences. The book is written much more like creative non-fiction than the usual academic book, so it's incredibly readable. Every now and again, the author uses an awkward turn of phrase or says something in a confusing way or gets out her thesaurus just to remind us that we are reading the work of the erudite, but on the whole, the style is very readable and accessible and the subject matter is deeply interesting.



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Oronooko: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not one I'll be rereading. I somehow missed reading this in college and wouldn't have read it now except that I'm teaching it. I know it's an important text, and I'm glad I've read it, but I found it very underwhelming. Also, the almost complete lack of dialogue made reading it fairly tedious.



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Comments

[kore]

Ooh, I LOVE the pre-Raffs (studied them in grad school so I know about Jane Morris and her wombat &c &c). This looks interesting. Did you see that sorta-hilarious Young Romantics series a while back with Aidan Turner? It wasn't that bad, the actresses were cast very well and it was sort of in period. I liked it a lot.

[wendelah1]

I'm not a teacher so this is probably a stupid question, but why are you teaching a book you don't think is very good?

[chelseagirl]

I've taught Oroonoko a number of times. Its place in the history of the novel is such that I don't think it can be fairly judged by contemporary standards; it's a strange book, indeed. I used to use the Bedford Cultural Edition, which had lots of nifty contextual stuff. It tended to teach well, anyway.