What Coxcomb Hall lacks in magic, vampires, and werewolves, it makes up for with prostitution, perversity, and humanity.

A washed-up folk legend tries his hand as a Neil Diamond impersonator in the Far East and suffers an annihilation of identity.

In a dark night of the soul a bourgeois citizen runs away from home: his life has been a lie, a waste, a wilful delusion. For forty days and forty nights he suffers and shivers alone in a derelict Notting Hill villa. Then, the inevitable. A pre-Thatcherite workers' cooperative, led by a minor aristocrat, storms the villa and lays waste his precious penance. "Live and let live!" he cries. But no. If the workers cannot save him, they must damn him.

Bradford Mudge's book looks at the origins of literary pornography in English, presenting a comprehensive overview of the complex issues surrounding pornography in the eighteenth century, as it appears in fiction, poetry, criticism, medical manuals, and illustrations. Mudge frames these battles in the context of contemporary feminine argument, while closely reading the moment in which the lines of battle were first drawn.

The two plays included in this volume follow the lives of a princess and a whore. Although set in Italy, this passionate tale of paternal disapproval and sexual deceit savors more of the underworld of Jacobean London with its asylums and prisons, gambling and prostitution.