Unspeakable A Life Beyond Sexual Morality Rachel Hope Cleves by Rachel Hope Cleves 9780226733531, 022673353X instant download after payment.

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence, and an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t.

U nspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. Her book delineates how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time and offers insight into how society can confront similar scandals today, celebrity and otherwise.

"A captivating book. . . A scholarly gem. . . Cleves’s book is a must read for people interested in the history of sexuality, the history of youth, the history of family, and the history of Italy." ― Canadian Journal of History

“Cleves has opened up a space to re-examine sensitively the history of pederasty. . . Cleves meditates on the difficulty of studying a sexual practice universally viewed as abhorrent today, ultimately insisting that historians of sexuality must put their moral reservations aside when seeking to understand how sexual mores, like definitions of childhood, have changed over time. She perceptively identifies structural factors that allowed Douglas to pursue his predilections freely.” ― History Today

“Cleves has written an exquisite biography of sexuality. . . . Unspeakable is a spellbinding account of tragedy, when one outlives their genre, toggling instead between uncelebrated and unintelligible, criminal and creep. “ ― Notches Blog

“ Unspeakable is a brave and beautifully written book, meticulously researched and carefully and ethically handled. Despite writing about a notable early-twentieth century British author who by today’s standards is nothing more than a pedophile, Cleves has managed the remarkable feat of producing a rich, compelling, and informative work of both history and biography that is as balanced and dispassionate as one can imagine possible.” ― Steven Angelides, author of The Fear of Child Sexuality