Desire

Anna Clark is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets (2017). She has also published Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in Britain, 1780–1845 (1987), The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), and Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2003).

• 1. Introduction: Sexuality and the problem of Western civilization 2. Sex and the city: Greece and Rome 3. Divine desire in ancient Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity 4. Desire in the early Middle Ages, 600-1200 CE: mysticism and regulation 5. From twilight moments to moral panics: the regulation of sex from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century 6. Sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica 7. Enlightening desire: new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 8. In the Victorian twilight. sex out of wedlock, sexual commerce, and same-sex desire, 1750–1870 9. Boundaries of the nation, boundaries of the self, 1860–1914Chapter 10. Sex and imperialism, 1857–1939 11. Managing desire or consuming sex in interwar culture 12. Sex and the state in the 1930s: Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany 13. The reconstruction of desire and sexual consumerism in postwar Europe 14. Sexual citizenship and sexual nationalism in times of crisis

"This new edition of Anna Clark’s landmark text Desire remains both authoritative and innovative, creatively deploying her concept of “twilight moments” to think through transgression, possibility, regulation, opportunity, and the complexity of human life across two millennia with nuance and sensitivity."Justin Bengry Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s College London"With new and thoughtful updates, Anna Clark's Desire remains one of the most important and indispensable histories of sexuality yet written. Beautifully written, it is a joy to read, and remains an urgent piece of historical research."Eleanor Janega, Guest Teacher, Department of International History, LSE