The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders - Softcover

Wilson, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881845892 ISBN 13: 9780881845891

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1990

Synopsis

An amazing investigation into the sexual perversities and preferences of modern-day society.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

True pornography began in the mid-1700s with Samuel Richardson's voyeuristic novels Pamela and Clarissa , in Wilson's odd estimate. The author of The Outsider , etc., further maintains that sexual perversionssuch as those catalogued by Richard von Krafft-Ebingscarcely existed before 1740; only after Romanticism unleashed modern imaginations did sexual deviance flourish, he asserts. The "sexual outsiders" whose deliciously naughty doings are chronicled in this thought-provoking, entertaining mishmash are men who used libido as rocket fuel to escape the body's confines and soar toward higher consciousness. They include Swinburne and T. E. Lawrence, both of whom liked to be flogged; Yukio Mishima, trapped inside his womb-like subjective world; Byron, titillated by an incestuous affair with his half-sister; egoist Henry Miller; and guilt-ridden, promiscuous homosexual Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wilson's starting-point is Charlotte Bach (born Carl Hajdu), a Hungarian male transvestite of whose farfetched theory of eros and evolution the author makes too much as he hammers home his thesis that sex resides as much in the heart and the imagination as in the loins.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0881845892
• ISBN 13: 9780881845891
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272