The secret vice: Masturbation in Victorian fiction and medical culture provides a unique reading of both fictional and medical writings concerned with auto-erotic sexuality in the long nineteenth century. The book examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by influential English, Continental and American practitioners such as J. H. Kellogg, E. B. Foote, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and R. V. Pierce as well as a number of anonymously authored texts popular in the period. Mason demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on the underworld literatures of Victorian pornography but also in the creation of well-known characters by authors now regarded as canonical including Dean Farrar, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. This is not merely a consideration of the male masturbator however: The secret vice presents the first detailed and, more essentially, balanced study of the largely overlooked literature on female masturbation in both clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader, as well as in fiction. The book concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of 'Victorian Dad', a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.
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About the Author
Diane Mason is a freelance writer and occasional lecturer in English literature.
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