Erotica An Anthology of Women's Writing

This collection is the first to explore the tradition and influences of women's erotica. It brings together the very best of erotic writing by women, from Sappho in Ancient Greece to Colette and Anais Nin in France, and comes bang up to date with some of the most controversial writers today, including Kathy Acker, Erica Jong and Marilyn Hacker.;Creatively arranged by themes, instead of chronology, the anthology yields telling juxtapositions which challenge conventional views of what erotica is - and what it is not. It also recovers women's perspectives on extremes of sexual experience which have been either sanitised or dismissed as disreputable. The result is eye-opening and often shocking, with tastes of texts as far apart as confessions extracted from condemned witches, nuns memoirs, accounts of sexual torture, pulp novels and contemporary (very) Dirty Realism.;Thoroughly inclusive, both in literary genre (fiction, poetry, drama, letters journals, autobiography, prayer and pornography) and in sexual orientation, this bold counterblast to the usual coy selections stimulates and excites the imagination whilst remaining an authoritative and respectable anthology of unrespectable writing.;Themes include: invitations, voyerism, lust, romance, fantasies, dangers, imaging desire, frustrations, consumations.