Georgian London evokes images of elegant mannered buildings, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife and houses of ill repute widespread in a sex trade that employed thousands. In London's Sinful Secret, Dan Cruickshank explores this erotic Georgian underworld and shows how it affected almost every aspect of life and culture in the city from the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone, to the squalid alleys around Charing Cross to the coffee houses, where prostitutes plied their trade, to the work of artists such as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Cruickshank uses memoirs, newspaper accounts and court records to create a surprisingly bawdy portrait of London at its most-mannered and, for the first time, exposes its secret, sinful underside. "A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters." - Kirkus Reviews

Thea Devine blends the heated sensuality of the finest Victorian erotic novels with the suspense and chilling aura of an Ann Rice tale.

This book analyzes an example of life-writing, an autobiography that was written in the early nineteenth century and will appeal to readers of many disciplines who are interested in understanding the interconnectedness of memory, textual narrative, and ideas of selfhood. Moreover, this book reasserts the importance of the individual in history. It explains how personal narratives reveal the individual as a purposeful social actor pursuing particular objectives, but framed by cultural and social contexts, in this case by eighteenth-century London and Imperial India. The author of this autobiography, William Hickey, projects a sense of self formed by a combination of an interiorized self-consciousness (an awareness of himself as an autonomous individual, although not one prone to deep self-reflection) and a socially-turned self-fashioning. Like so many autobiographers of his time, Hickey’s self is realized through the production of a narrative, his self fixed and defined through the act of writing. As he wrote his memoirs, Hickey was engaged in purposeful textual representation to satisfy his perceived sense of place in that culture (above all, as a gentleman) while tacitly reflecting the constraints of that culture imposed upon the form and content of the text.

Betrothed to one brother, then married to another, Julianne Sutton finds herself a pawn in an unknown game. The enigmatic new Marquess of Longhaven knows all about the art of deception but he's baffled by innocence. His new wife is trusting, lovely, and utterly bewitching. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that she has secrets of her own. As he battles a ruthless enemy, he quickly learns that love has an entirely different set of rules.

"This book recounts four centuries of the history of women labeled public women, whores, and prostitutes in New Spain's archival records and works of literature from Spain and Mexico. Performing conventional gender roles, women resisted the archival inscription of these labels, so this complex story of multi-layered viceregal sex work acknowledges the ambiguities and limitations of documenting the history of sexuality via written sources. The elusive, ever-changing terminology for prosecuted women in the early modern Iberian world, voiced by kings, jurists, magistrates, inquisitors, and bishops, as well as disgruntled husbands and neighbors, foreshadows the increasing regulation, criminalization, and polarizing politics of modern global transactional sex. Key themes include: the history of the word "prostitute/prostitution," narratives presented by women in a court setting, the creation of a victim narrative by defendants and prosecutors, legal history, and the importance of the economic and familial context in shaping sexual transactionality. Sources used come from the archives of police, church, and inquisitorial investigations. Interpretations are shaped by archival and sex work activism theories"--Provided by publisher.

What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.