Sex and Death in Victorian Literature Regina Barreca, Editor Indiana University Press March 1990 Hardcover ISBN#: 0253310156 Purchase this text online at Amazon.com Sex and Death in Victorian Literature is a landmark collection of thirteen previously published essays on nineteenth-century British poetry, fiction and prose by the most important English and American scholars in the field. The volume observes the subject from an unusually wide variety of viewpoints, including historical, sociological, psychoanalytic, feminist and mythological. There are works central and peripheral to the traditional Victorian canon discussed in Sex and Death; as such, the essays present an unprecedented perspective on the shifts and movements of nineteenth-century literature. ~There have been a number of discussions dealing with the Victorians' widely accepted equation of sexual activity with a shortened lifespan. Men's sexual release was regarded as a kind of 'expenditure' that depleted his physical strength as well as his moral resolve, bringing him closer to death with each orgasm.... There persisted in the equation of 'sex with women equals loss of vitality' the notion that women draw energy from men. This may be regarded by some as an elaborate reaction- formation to the fact that women of the day did, in many cases, give up their lives to the service of men. It was men who took vitality from women, it can be argued--women who should have feared the vampire-like feeding of husbands and children. --Regina Barreca, Introduction Purchase this text online at Amazon.com