Strange Antics

Stories of seduction often entertain and perturb in equal measure. From Pamela, the 1740 novel about a young woman who goes to work for a rapacious man, to Fifty Shades of Grey, the 2011 internationally bestselling erotica, we have always been hungry for narratives about seduction and resistance, temptation and sex.

For the first time, Clement Knox tackles a history of seduction: how have these narratives developed in step with our changing worlds, values and interests over the centuries?

Opening with a thunderclap, Knox observes Zeus' wandering eyes and near-unstoppable power; the various types of nun, damsel and chivalric ideal roaming the Middle Ages; and the explosion of Casanova and his guard across the novels of the Enlightenment. We think about women and seduction through Mary Wollstonecroft and her daughter, who became Mary Shelley; about the suggestive, powerful pull of the bad choice from Bram Stoker to the charisma of Nazism; about the sexual liberation and feminism of the late twentieth century; and about the world of today, with its complex, challenging cultural articulations from ‘#MeToo' to ‘incel'.

If sex has generally been agreed a private matter, seduction has always been of utmost public interest. The limits of the day often found their battleground in the courtrooms – whether the hanging of ‘the most popular Whore-master in the three Kingdoms' for rape in 1730 London, or the cases in 1870s Georgia where judgements were passed on what and who constituted ‘a seducible woman'. This is a history of legal battles, economic terms, culture, literature, and news.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, Knox observes how the formats of seduction have developed, and how traditional tropes jostle now against our more cynical or liberated views when it comes to victimhood, vulnerability and virtue, and the idea of the seducer as hero, or villain, predator, menace. Covering serious study through brilliant stories anecdotes, Knox gives a living history of seduction, bringing to the surface the class politics, feminist strains, hero narratives, group psychologies, and historical modes of storytelling at play.

About the Author

Clement Knox was born in Hong Kong in 1989. He has a B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford and an M.A. in International Relations and Economics from Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in London, where he works for Waterstones as a nonfiction buyer. Strange Antics will be his first book.