Books to read with one hand: erotic autobiography, Victorian sexology and queer pornography

In the late nineteenth century, one begins to perceive an intermingling of sexology and pornography in queer writing. Same-sex attracted men were using these two forms to discuss their lives in a relatively uncensored format. The integration of sexology into pornography and vice versa, and the shared autobiographical approach that characterises these writings, is here referred to as erotic autobiography: a self-fashioning narrative of eroticism written and consumed by same-sex attracted men and published either as pornography or sexology. This thesis argues that the texts studied – Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the anonymously published The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, and Teleny – all represent an autobiographical move in queer writing with an underlying desire to disrupt the genres in which they are placed. By exploring the texts in this way I offer a study of the genres of erotic literature in the decades leading up to the development of Freudian psychoanalysis.