If you've ever wanted to know the "correct" words to "Roll Me Over," or wondered where the melody of "Sweet Betsy from Pike" came from, this book can answer your questions. Extensively revised and including forty more songs than its predecessor, this new edition of The Erotic Muse is a unique scholarly collection of bawdy or forbidden American folksongs. Ed Cray presents the full texts of some 125 songs, with melodies for most of them and detailed annotations for all. His lively commentary places the songs in historical, social, and, where appropriate, psychological context.

Garry Shead is one of Australia's most highly acclaimed lyrical figurative painters and has been in the public eye since his first solo exhibition mid 1960s. Grishin argues that despite the stylistic diversity, there exists a single unifying thread throughout his work an erotic impulse.

What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings? Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the literature of America’s early years speaks of unruly, carnal longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era’s proliferation of texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety about the dangers of unfettered feeling but an endorsement of it. Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual. Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman’s story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.

The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

Events ranging from sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib to the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hint that important issues surrounding gender and sexuality remain at the core of political and cultural problems. Nonetheless, intersectional analyses of militarism that account for questions of race, class, and gender remain exceedingly rare. Abuses of the Erotic fills this gap by offering a comprehensive picture of how military values have permeated the civilian cultural sphere and by investigating connections between sexuality and militarism in the United States since the late 1980s. Josh Cerretti takes up the urgent task of applying an interdisciplinary, transnational framework to the role of sexuality in promoting, expanding, and sustaining the war on terror to understand the links between what Cerretti calls “domestic militarism” and later projects of state-backed violence and intervention. This work brings together scholarship on domestic and international militarization in relation to both homosexuality and heterosexuality to demonstrate how sexual and gender politics have been deployed to bolster U.S. military policies and, by tracking over a decade of militarized sexuality, how these instances have foundationally changed how we think of sexual and gender politics today.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Erotics of History challenges long-standing notions of sexuality as stable and context-free--as something that individuals discover about themselves. Rather, Donald L. Donham argues that historical circumstance, local social pressure, and the cultural construction of much beyond sex condition the erotic. Donham makes this argument in relation to the centuries-old conversation on the fetish, applied to a highly unusual neighborhood in Atlantic Africa. There, local men, soon to be married to local women, are involved in long-term sexual relationships with European men. On the African side, these couplings are motivated by the pleasures of cosmopolitan connection and foreign commodities. On the other side, Europeans tend to fetishize Africans’ race, while a few search to become slaves in master/ slave relationships. At its most wide ranging, The Erotics of History attempts to show that it is history, both personal and collective, in reversals and reenactments, that finally produces sexual excitement.

Readers are saying, “Holy hotness!” … “the sexiest thing I have ever read” … “5 stars are not enough!” One wealthy heir. One new college grad. A roommate who can best be described as sex on a stick. A job that entails researching Regency era brothels and, um, “acting.” What could possibly go wrong? (Damn near everything.) My name is Sim. This book is about Alaric White—my best friend, college roommate, partner in literary crime. Alaric writes kissing books. And by “kissing,” I mean … well, you know what I mean. He writes each book with a muse. (If the IRS asks, tell them she’s a “research assistant.”) Yeah, I’ve told him this reflects a certain lack of imagination on his part. But I help out with his books so far be it from me to complain too much. Usually it doesn’t take him long to find a “research assistant” for a new book. Women send him their “resumes.” Call. Email. Turn up at every stop on his book tours. (I know, it’s a rough life but someone has to live it.) But his current work-in-progress? Well, it’s different. So he needs a different muse. Someone innocent and untouched … but also brave enough to embark on a journey into her deepest, darkest desires. After a year, he’s still searching. His agent is getting antsy. (Okay, she’s on the verge of full-blown panic that he won’t finish the book on time.) Then he sees her, looking like an angel just arisen from a leisurely afternoon of amour. (His exact words.) She’s sitting in a suburban coffee shop … and being threatened by a goon with a pistol in his waistband. (Dear reader, he rescues her.) Then a plot twist no one saw coming. He knows he should let her go. But he’s a selfish bastard. (I am too, but that’s a different story.) He just needs to keep her long enough to finish the book … Muse is a melt-your-clothes-off scorching hot standalone billionaire (well, Alaric's not technically a billionaire but he acts like one half the time) boss romance with a sweet happy ever after. (If I might say so myself.) Find out why readers are saying, “Holy hotness!” … “the sexiest thing I have ever read” … “5 stars are not enough!” (Well, I’m one of the reasons why they say that.) Of course, everyone wants my story now, too. We’ll see. My story makes Alaric’s look like a damn fairy tale. A twisted sort of fairy tale, but … well, just read it. (Trust me, it’s worth it.)

The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, Bartók, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill.

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.

Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.