12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Sexuality Medicalized
Sexuality, gender or desire framed as disease or medical object.
Works
A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
This volume collects three of Aristophanes' comedies (contents vary by edition; a long-standing selection is The Acharnians, The Clouds and Lysistrata). The Acharnians (425 BCE), the earliest surviving comedy, is set in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Pride and Prejudice turns courtship into a discipline of moral interpretation. Elizabeth Bennet first judges Fitzwilliam Darcy by his proud refusal to dance and by Wickham's persuasive account of injury, while Darcy judges Elizabeth through the embarrassment of her family, the inferiority of her connections, and his own rank.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs are among the central monuments of medieval monastic spirituality. They do not offer a continuous modern commentary on every verse.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Descent of Man applies evolutionary theory to human beings and develops Darwin's account of sexual selection. Darwin argues that humans share ancestry with other animals and that differences between human and animal mental faculties are differences of degree rather than absolute kind.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Satires of Horace and Persius brings together two Roman satiric voices separated by style, temperament and political world. Horace's Sermones, written after the civil wars and during the rise of Augustus, are conversational poems about greed, ambition, social climbing, sexual folly, legacy-hunting, literary quarrels, dinner parties and the art of living within limits.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelfth Night begins with shipwreck, loss, and disguise. Viola believes her brother Sebastian drowned, enters Illyria as Cesario, and serves Duke Orsino, who sends her to woo Olivia.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr.
We is presented as the diary or record of D-503, mathematician and builder of the spaceship Integral in the OneState, a glass-walled totalitarian society ruled by the Benefactor. Citizens, called Numbers, live by tables of hours, regulated labor, monitored sex, prescribed walks and transparent architecture.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Patsey chapters
Patsey's sexual exploitation and whipping expose gendered torture and reproductive vulnerability under slavery.
- A View from the Bridge, Act 1 (two-act version)
Eddie's consultation with Alfieri, in which he insists Rodolpho is 'not right' and Alfieri hints at what Eddie feels.
- A View from the Bridge, Act 2 (two-act version), opening
Eddie comes home drunk and kisses both Catherine and Rodolpho.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three, §47
The 'religious neurosis' linked to solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence, with speculation about disguised epilepsy and mention of alienists studying the Salvation Army.
- BUtterfield 8, Middle section (flashback)
Account of Gloria's sexual abuse as a girl and its aftermath.
- City of God, Book 1
Augustine consoles Christians after Rome’s sack and discusses captivity, rape, shame and suicide.
- City of God, Books 13–14
Death, flesh, will and disordered desire are traced to the fall.
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. IV and notes
Restriction of sexual life by civilization; speculation that upright posture and the devaluation of smell led to 'organic repression'.
- Cold Comfort Farm, Mr Mybug's walks with Flora
Mybug reads sexual symbolism into nature, parodying Freudian criticism.
- Confessions, Book I
Born 'in a very weakly and infirm state'; his mother's death after childbirth; his aunt's care; the spanking at Bossey and its lasting effect on his sexuality.
- Early Christian Lives, Jerome, Life of Malchus
Sexual danger, chastity and captivity are narrated as tests of ascetic identity.
- Lysistrata and Other Plays, Lysistrata, Myrrhine and Kinesias; envoys' scene
Sexual frustration presented as an ailment afflicting men across Greece.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, first monody and speeches
Medea speaks of women’s risks in marriage, childbirth and dependence on husbands.
- Metamorphoses, Book III
Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and wastes away; Echo fades to a voice; Tiresias's change of sex.
- Metamorphoses, Book IV
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus merge into one body.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 4
Dream images, sexual arousal and erotic fixation are explained through bodily images and habit.
- Passing, Part Two
Disagreements between Irene and Brian over what to tell their sons about sex and lynching; Brian's dissatisfaction with medicine and his wish to go to Brazil.
- Persian Letters, Early seraglio letters (c. Letters 9 and following)
The Chief Eunuch describes his castration and his resentment of the women he guards.
- Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Phaedrus 251a–252b
The lover's symptoms: shuddering, sweating, fever, sleeplessness and obsessive longing as the wings regrow.
- Pride and Prejudice, Crisis and consent
Pride and Prejudice gives this tag concrete force through its medical angle is modest but present in nerves, hypochondriacal comedy, domestic stress, and the social management of women's bodies and futures
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Medico-forensic introduction
Krafft-Ebing presents sexuality as an object of psychiatric and legal expertise.
- Psychopathia Sexualis, Case-history sections
The cases show the power and danger of translating desire into degenerative pathology.
- Sermons on the Song of Songs, Early sermons on the kiss
The language of bodily intimacy becomes an account of spiritual desire and affective transformation.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book VI (Deraa, November 1917)
Lawrence's account of his capture, flogging and sexual assault and of the lasting damage to his sense of self. Handle with care: the account is contested as fact and should be cited as his testimony.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 2
Heroical or love-melancholy treated as a disease, with symptoms (wasting, sleeplessness, sighing) and cures from diet and labour to marriage.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, Pentheus disguised
Pentheus’ desire to spy is manipulated through cross-dressing, fascination and altered perception.
- The Complete Poems, Song of Myself
The speaker's celebration of bodies, breath, touch, labor and sexuality makes embodiment central to democratic vision.
- The Complete Poems, I Sing the Body Electric
The poem treats the human body as spiritually charged and socially meaningful.
- The Descent of Man, Sexual selection chapters
The account of mate choice and sex difference influenced later biological and medical thinking about sexuality.
- The Golden Ass, Books 4–6
Cupid and Psyche explores forbidden sight, trials and divine affliction inside the larger transformation plot.
- The Golden Ass, Book 10
Plans to exhibit Lucius in a sexual spectacle expose bodily exploitation and public entertainment.
- The Histories, Book 1.105; 4.67
The Scythian Enarees, men afflicted by a 'female disease', said to be punishment for plundering a temple.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V, typical dreams
Dreams of embarrassment at nakedness, examination dreams and dreams of the death of loved persons, leading to the Oedipus and Hamlet readings and the discussion of childhood sexuality and sibling rivalry.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Guigemar'
The rebounding arrow wounds Guigemar in the thigh; the hind prophesies that only a woman's love can heal him.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Chaitivel'
The surviving suitor is wounded in the thigh, alive but unable to enjoy love.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, The Lovely Leave
A wartime reunion compresses longing, resentment, panic and bodily expectation into a brief domestic interval.
- The Republic, Book 5
Guardian reproduction and family arrangements treat politics as managed breeding and education.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 2-3
Hester's postpartum public punishment makes sexuality, maternity and communal discipline visible on the scaffold.
- The Symposium, Diotima speech
Love ascends from bodies to souls, laws, knowledge and Beauty itself as a therapeutic education of desire.
- The Symposium, Alcibiades speech
A drunken Alcibiades describes erotic fixation, shame and failed seduction of Socrates.
- The Underdogs, Camila and La Pintada episodes
Sexual jealousy and coercion reveal gendered vulnerability in the revolutionary camp.
- The Vampyre, Opening London society
Ruthven's social effect resembles moral contagion, harming the innocent while leaving corrupt people flourishing.
- The World as Will and Representation, Second Book, §§18–20
Identity of willing and bodily movement; pain and pleasure as immediate affections of the will; organs as objectified desires.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §60
Affirmation of the will in the sexual impulse; the genitals as the focus of the will.
- Travels with My Aunt, Augusta's travel stories
Augusta's erotic and criminal memories challenge medicalized assumptions about sexuality and old age.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book II
Pandarus interprets Troilus's symptoms and treats persuasion of Criseyde as the remedy.
- Twelfth Night, Malvolio enclosed
Twelfth Night gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes melancholy, love-sickness, feigned madness, confinement, and the social power to declare someone disordered
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Poems 1-5
The beloved's body is repeatedly fused with earth, fruit, hills and night, making desire a mind-body landscape.
- We, Early records
D-503 praises rational happiness and describes regulated sex, time and transparent living as healthful social order.
- We, O-90 pregnancy plot
O-90's illegal pregnancy exposes reproductive control and the state's claim over bodies.
Quotes
“Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence”
“it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”
“King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of our childhood”
“Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire”