Sculpture, Sexuality and History

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction—Desiring Sculptures, Encountering the Past: Sculpture, Sexuality and History

   • Jana Funke, Jen Grove

   Pages 1-32

3. The Desire for the Living Statue and the Desire for the Past

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

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   2. Antiquarian Pygmalions: The Female Body, Ancient Statuary, and the Idea of Imaginary Transport in the Eighteenth Century

      • Katharina Boehm

      Pages 35-56

   3. Longing for the Past: Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, Historical Experience, and the Sexuality of the Masterpieces Room

      • Elsje van Kessel

      Pages 57-79

   4. Women, or Wax? Eros, Thanatos, and Sculpture in Cinema

      • Vito Adriaensens

      Pages 81-101

4. Sculptural Decency: Reception, Censorship and Liberation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103

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   2. The Indecent Body of Sculpture: Theodor Storm’s Realist Psyche

      • Catriona MacLeod

      Pages 105-124

   3. A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object

      • Bernard Vere

      Pages 125-143

   4. Ethics and Erotics: Receptions of an Ancient Statue of a Nymph and Satyr

      • Victoria Donnellan

      Pages 145-167

5. Queer Possibilities of Statuary

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 169-169

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   2. “Firm Outlines and Hard Muscles Immortalised”: Ancient Statuary and E.P. Warren’s “Uranian Ideal”

      • Jen Grove

      Pages 171-194Open Access

   3. Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture

      • Francesco Ventrella

      Pages 195-219

   4. The Queer Materiality of History: H.D., Freud and the Bronze Athena

      • Jana Funke

      Pages 221-244Open Access

   5. “Britain’s Most Romantic Museum”?: Lesbian Spectatorship and the Reception of Historic Figural Sculpture at the V&A

      • Amy Mechowski

      Pages 245-267

6. Back Matter

   Pages 269-280

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This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opensup a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality.


Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

• Sexual knowledge
• Morality
• Erotic art
• Statuary
• Material culture

• University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

  Jana Funke, Jen Grove

Jana Funke is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on modernist literature and the history of sexuality and the history of sexual science. Previous books include The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall (2016) and Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011, co-edited with Ben Davies). She directs (with Kate Fisher) the Wellcome Trust-funded 'Rethinking Sexology' project (2015-2020).



Jen Grove is an Engaged Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter, UK. She is employed on the Wellcome Trust-funded 'Rethinking Sexology' project (2015-2020). Jen has published several book chapters and articles on the modern collection and reception of ancient objects and the history of sexuality.

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