Published by Grafton, 1989, softcover, condition: very good.
The author traces the history of what he views as "super-heated reality": by looking at the life and works of Romantic and post-romantic writers from the Marquis de Sade through Byron, Gogol, Swinburne to - among others - James Joyce, Henry Miller, T. E. Lawrence and the Japanese cult figure and novelist Yukio Mishima. Along the way we observe the rise of p****graphy and see the forces that unleashed the increasing frequency of sex crimes. ALA Booklist said "Based on the premise that so many creative men were sexually deviant makes for a book full of fascinating details". From the Houston Post, "Wilson continues producing thought-provoking books, all grounded in his original insight of a new breed of being, the social outcast as existential artist". Includes a bibliography and extensive index.
The author, Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism. Howard F. Dossor writes: "Wilson constitutes one of the most significant challenges to twentieth-century critics. It seems most likely that critics analyzing his work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him. But it is not merely for their sake that he should be examined. Critics who turn to him will find themselves involved in the central questions of our age and will be in touch with a mind that has disclosed an extraordinary resilience in addressing them."
True p****graphy 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 perversions such as those catalogued by Richard von Krafft-Ebing scarcely 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.
