The history of sexuality

Abstract

Interest in the history of sexuality, perhaps more than any other factor, has defined the genre of the ancient novel as we now know it. As the focus in scholarship gradually shifted, during the last few decades of the twentieth century, from women's studies to the study of gender and sexuality, the ancient novels, with their flamboyant attention to the erotic, appealed to the Zeitgeist . This led to their greater exposure, largely through the work of the philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault, and subsequent discussions. A less positive outcome has been to privilege the 'erotic' novels over other works of imperial prose fiction, and thus to narrow our conception of the genre. Had biography or travel narrative driven the agenda as hard as the history of sexuality has (and is doing), what we commonly understand as 'the ancient novel' might look rather different. If an interest in the history of sexuality has directed how the ancient novels have been conceived as a genre, then attitudes towards sexuality have influenced the treatment of individual works on an even more fundamental level. They have determined how the novels are transmitted: how the physical texts of the novels reach their readers. Scribes, editors, and translators through the ages have amended and athetised the texts according to their moral beliefs. A revised version of the earliest English translation of Petronius' Satyrica in the Victorian era rewrote the 'Pergamene boy' scene of same-sex seduction as the (reassuringly heterosexual) 'Pergamene girl'.