Erotic literature

The term erotic literature refers to fictional or factual stories and accounts of eros intended to sexually arouse readers. This may overlap yet also contrast with erotica, which focuses more specifically on sexual feelings. Other common elements are satire and social criticism. Much erotic literature features erotic art to illustrate the text.
Although cultural disapproval of erotic literature has always existed, its circulation was not seen as a major problem before the invention of printing, as the costs of producing individual manuscripts limited distribution to a very small group of wealthy and literate readers. The invention of printing, in the 15th century, brought with it both a greater market and increasing restrictions, including censorship and legal restraints on publication on the grounds of obscenity. Because of this, much of the production of this type of material became clandestine.

History

Early periods

The oldest found love poem is Istanbul 2461, circa 2000 BCE, an erotic monologue written by a female speaker directed to king Shu-Sin.
In ancient Sumer, a whole cycle of poems revolved around the erotic lovemaking between the goddess Inanna and her consort Dumuzid the Shepherd.
In the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs, found in the last section of the Tanakh, celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy".
Many erotic poems have survived from ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek poets Straton of Sardis and Sappho of Lesbos both wrote erotic lyric poems. The poet Archilochus wrote numerous satirical poems filled with obscene and erotic imagery. Erotic poems continued to be written in Hellenistic and Roman times by writers like Automedon, Philodemus and Marcus Argentarius. Roman erotic poets included Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Martial and Juvenal, and the anonymous Priapeia. Some later Latin authors such as Joannes Secundus also wrote erotic verse.
Haft Peykar also known as Bahramnameh is a romantic epic by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi written in 1197. This poem is a part of the Nizami's Khamsa. The original title Haft Peykar can be translated literally as "seven portraits" with the figurative meaning of "seven beauties." The poem is a masterpiece of erotic literature, but it is also a profoundly moralistic work.
During the Renaissance period, many poems were not written for publication; instead, they were merely circulated in manuscript form among a relatively limited readership. This was the original method of circulation for the Sonnets of William Shakespeare, who also wrote the erotic poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight is a fifteenth-century Arabic sex manual and work of erotic literature by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi, also known simply as "Nefzawi". The book presents opinions on what qualities men and women should have to be attractive and gives advice on sexual technique, warnings about sexual health, and recipes to remedy sexual maladies. It gives lists of names for the penis and vulva, and has a section on the interpretation of dreams. Interspersed with these there are a number of stories which are intended to give context and amusement.

17th century

In the 17th century, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester was notorious for obscene verses, many of which were published posthumously in compendiums of poetry by him and other "Restoration rakes" such as Sir Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, and George Etherege. Though many of the poems attributed to Rochester were actually by other authors, his reputation as a libertine was such that his name was used as a selling point by publishers of collections of erotic verse for centuries after. One poem definitely by him was "A Ramble in St. James's Park", in which the protagonist's quest for healthy exercise in the park uncovers instead "Bugg'ries, Rapes and Incest" on ground polluted by debauchery from the time when "Ancient Pict began to Whore". This poem was being censored from collections of Rochester's poetry as late as 1953, though, in line with the subsequent general change in attitudes to sexuality, it was dramatised as a scene in the film The Libertine about his life, based on an existing play.
English collections of erotic verse by various hands include the Drollery collections of the 17th century; Pills to Purge Melancholy ; the Roxburghe Ballads; Bishop Percy's Folio; The Musical Miscellany; National Ballad and Song: Merry Songs and Ballads Prior to the Year AD 1800 edited by J. S. Farmer; the three volume Poetica Erotica and its more obscene supplement the Immortalia both edited by T. R. Smith. French collections include Les Muses gaillardes ''Le Cabinet satyrique and La Parnasse des poetes satyriques''.

18th century

In the 18th century, a famous collection of four erotic poems, was published in England in 1763, called An Essay on Woman. This included the title piece, an obscene parody of Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man"; "Veni Creator: or, The Maid's Prayer", which is original; the "Universal Prayer", an obscene parody of Pope's poem of the same name, and "The Dying Lover to his Prick", which parodies "A Dying Christian to his Soul" by Pope. These poems have been attributed to John Wilkes and/or Thomas Potter and receive the distinction of being the only works of erotic literature ever read out loud and in their entirety in the House of Lords—before being declared obscene and blasphemous by that body and the supposed author, Wilkes, declared an outlaw.
Robert Burns worked to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, sometimes revising, expanding, and adapting them. One of the better known of these collections is The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a collection of bawdy lyrics that were popular in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th century.

19th century

One of the 19th century's foremost poets—Algernon Charles Swinburne—devoted much of his considerable talent to erotic verse, producing, inter alia, twelve eclogues on flagellation titled The Flogging Block "by Rufus Rodworthy, annotated by Barebum Birchingly"; more was published anonymously in The Whippingham Papers. Another notorious anonymous 19th-century poem on the same subject is The Rodiad, ascribed to George Colman the Younger. John Camden Hotten even wrote a pornographic comic opera, Lady Bumtickler's Revels, on the theme of flagellation in 1872.
Pierre Louÿs helped found a literary review, La Conque in 1891, where he proceeded to publish Astarte—an early collection of erotic verse already marked by his distinctive elegance and refinement of style. He followed up in 1894 with another erotic collection in 143 prose poems—Songs of Bilitis , this time with strong lesbian themes.

20th century

Although D. H. Lawrence could be regarded as a writer of love poems, he usually dealt in the less romantic aspects of love such as sexual frustration or the sex act itself. Ezra Pound, in his Literary Essays, complained of Lawrence's interest in his own "disagreeable sensations" but praised him for his "low-life narrative". This is a reference to Lawrence's dialect poems akin to the Scots poems of Robert Burns, in which he reproduced the language and concerns of the people of Nottinghamshire from his youth. He called one collection of poems Pansies partly for the simple ephemeral nature of the verse but also a pun on the French word panser, to dress or bandage a wound. "The Noble Englishman" and "Don't Look at Me" were removed from the official edition of Pansies on the grounds of obscenity; Lawrence felt wounded by this.
From the age of 17, Gavin Ewart acquired a reputation for wit and accomplishment through such works as "Phallus in Wonderland" and "Poems and Songs", which appeared in 1939 and was his first collection. The intelligence and casually flamboyant virtuosity with which he framed his often humorous commentaries on human behaviour made his work invariably entertaining and interesting. The irreverent eroticism for which his poetry is noted resulted in W H Smith's banning of his "The Pleasures of the Flesh" from their shops.
Canadian poet John Glassco wrote Squire Hardman, a long poem in heroic couplets, purporting to be a reprint of an 18th-century poem by George Colman the Younger, on the theme of flagellation.
Italian Una Chi distinguished herself among other publications for coldly analytical prose and for the crudeness of the stories.

Other accounts

Writings of prostitutes

was the focus of much of the earliest erotic works. The term pornography is derived from the Greek pornographos meaning "writer about prostitutes", originally denoting descriptions of the lives and manners of prostitutes and their customers in Ancient Greece. According to Athenaeus in The Deipnosophists these constituted a considerable genre, with many lubricious treatises, stories and dramas on the subject. A surviving example of this genre is Lucian of Samosata's Dialogues of the Courtesans.
Accounts of prostitution have continued as a major part of the genre of erotic literature. In the 18th century, directories of prostitutes and their services, such as Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, provided both entertainment and instruction.
In the 19th century, the sensational journalism of W. T. Stead's The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon about the procuring of underage girls into the brothels of Victorian London provided a stimulus for the erotic imagination. Stead's account was widely translated and the revelation of "padded rooms for the purpose of stifling the cries of the tortured victims of lust and brutality" and the symbolic figure of "The Minotaur of London" confirmed European observers worst imaginings about "Le Sadisme anglais" and inspired erotic writers to write of similar scenes set in London or involving sadistic English gentlemen. Such writers include D'Annunzio in Il Piacere, Paul-Jean Toulet in Monsieur de Paur, Octave Mirbeau in Jardin des Supplices and Jean Lorrain in Monsieur de Phocas.
Well-known recent works in this genre are The Happy Hooker: My Own Story by the Dutch madame Xaviera Hollander and The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour.