page_title: Erotic literature
section_title: 18th century
hierarchical_section_title: Erotic literature / Erotic fiction / History of western erotic fiction / 18th century
caption_attribution_description: First page from Justine (Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, Paris)
context_page_description: Erotic literature comprises fictional and factual stories and accounts of eros – passionate, romantic or sexual relationships – intended to arouse similar feelings in readers, in contrast to erotica, which focuses more specifically on sexual feelings. Erotic literature can take the form of novels, short stories, poetry, true-life memoirs, and sex manuals. A common feature of the genre is sexual fantasies on such themes as prostitution, orgies, sadomasochism, and many other taboo subjects and fetishes, which may or may not be expressed in explicit language. Other common elements are satire and social criticism. Much erotic literature features erotic art, illustrating the text.
  Despite cultural disapproval of such material, circulation of erotic literature 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 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.
context_section_description: An early pioneer of the publication of erotic works in England was Edmund Curll (1675–1747) who published many of the Merryland books. These were a somewhat peculiar English genre of erotic fiction in which the female body (and sometimes the male) was described in terms of a landscape. The earliest work in this genre seems to be Erotopolis: The Present State of Bettyland (1684) probably by Charles Cotton. This was included, in abbreviated form, in The Potent Ally: or Succours from Merryland (1741). Other works include  A New Description of Merryland. Containing a Topographical, Geographical and Natural History of that Country (1740) by Thomas Stretzer, Merryland Displayed (1741) and set of maps entitled A Compleat Set of Charts of the Coasts of Merryland (1745). The last book in this genre appears to be a parody of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) entitled  La Souriciere. The Mousetrap. A Facetious and Sentimental Excursion through part of Austrian Flanders and France (1794) by "Timothy Touchit".
  The rise of the novel in 18th-century England provided a new medium for erotica. One of the most famous in this new genre was Fanny Hill (1748) by John Cleland. This book set a new standard in literary smut and was often adapted for the cinema in the 20th century. Peter Fryer suggests that Fanny Hill was a high point in British erotica, at least in the eighteenth century, in a way that mainstream literature around it had also reached a peak at that time, with writers like Defoe, Richardson and Fielding all having made important and lasting contributions to literature in its first half. After 1750, he suggests, when the Romantic period began, the quality of mainstream writing and of smut declined in tandem. Writes Fryer: "sex was driven out of the English novel in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The castration of imaginative English literature made the clandestine literature of sex the most poverty stricken and boring in Europe".
  Meanwhile, French writers kept their stride. One genre, which vies in oddness with the English "Merryland" productions, was inspired by the newly translated Arabian Nights and involved the transformation of people into objects which were in propinquity with or employed in sexual relationships: such as sofas, dildos and even bidets. The climax of this trend is represented in French philosopher Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets (1747) in which a magic ring is employed to get women's vaginas to give an account of their intimate sexual histories.
  Other works of French erotica from this period include Thérèse Philosophe (1748) by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens which describes a girl's initiation into the secrets of both philosophy and sex.; The Lifted Curtain or Laura's Education, about a young girl's sexual initiation by her father, written by the French revolutionary politician Comte de Mirabeau; also Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in 1782.
  In the late 18th century, such works as Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue and 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade were exemplars of the theme of sado-masochism and influenced later erotic accounts of Sadism and masochism in fiction. De Sade (as did the later writer Sacher-Masoch) lent his name to the sexual acts which he describes in his work.
caption: Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4864", "Image ImageLength": "3828", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2012:10:19 14:44:39", "Image ExifOffset": "228", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "378", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6622", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1200", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "945"}